Videos & Tutorials
Interdisciplinary collaboration is the key to advancing modern science. To encourage successful interdisciplinary partnerships, the BioSocial Methods Collaborative has tutorials and videos to assist researchers in building a common knowledge base.
Epigenetics Tutorial
Addressing the problems of modern society requires deep knowledge, creativity, and a diverse set of skills. To understand, for example, the current type 2 diabetes epidemic, why some subpopulations are more vulnerable or resilient to this disorder than others, requires a bit of epidemiology, a bit of a demography, a bit of a genetics, a bit of a psychology, a bit of anthropology, and so on.
No single person can embody all of the necessary knowledge, creativity, and skill to solve these problems. But we live in great times; science has advanced far enough that the imaginary boundaries traditionally used to divide one academic discipline from another, one type of scientist from another, are fading. Every day that we add to our knowledge of the world, the chasm that separates social scientists from bioscientists shrinks a little more. In order to create a transdisciplinary scholarship capable of addressing today’s big research questions, we must take advantage of this situation. We must build bridges to connect our previously distant academic tribes. In short: we need to collaborate—but first we need to speak each other’s languages.
This tutorial series serves as one “language lesson” in epigenetics, a field that demonstrably bridges the social and biological sciences. At its core, epigenetics is about the interaction between the environment (both physical and social) and the genome, and their combined effect on the human condition. In the next few decades, research in epigenetics may transform the way we look at human development and personalized medical care.
