The Human Envirome and a Scholarship Prize to be won.

Something you might be able to use some day.

One of my main points in this invited lecture was to talk about the passivity implied by ‘exposome’ and ‘exposures’ of the type that our 18th century ancestors might have experienced.

In the 21st century, there is a broader array of active behavioral choices that influence the environmental characteristics, circumstances, conditions, and processes we face with potential impact on health and disease, morbidity and mortality.

The behavioral choice to try oxycodone or psilocybin or to travel to Ebola-affected areas of Africa either was non-existent or remarkably rare in the past. 

Today, epidemiology has not yet come to grips with the modeling required to bring behavioral choices into play.

Our closest allies are in econometrics, which has a head start of roughly 50 years in research on behavioral choices (e.g., see origins of McFadden’s choice model, akin to our conditional form of multiple logistic regression for matched risk sets).

Epidemiology cannot ignore what Glen H. Elder called ‘life course’ and this mandate unites epidemiology and econometrics with developmental sciences and Elder’s pioneering conceptual models.

There is a future for epidemiology at this intersection. See some encouragement in an image down below.