President's Message: Moving Forward in Community

Christine Hunter, PhD, ABPP, SBM President

I really struggled writing this message. When I ran for SBM President, I assumed I would use these brief messages to articulate an aspirational vision for behavioral medicine. Right now, all of that is harder to focus on and feels like it would be incredibly off the mark. These are strange and challenging times for all of health science but particularly for threatened areas of science and threatened scientists. The health research landscape in the U.S. is dire. In my opinion, the damage to public trust in science and to the science career pipeline (from students to established investigators) is hard to underestimate and may be impossible to fully restore.

Clearly, I am off to an awful start if I hope to salvage some hope and vision in this message! Let me try to course correct. Each of us and the organizations we are associated with will approach the challenges in science from different lenses and take varied types of action. We will not always agree but I hope that through these challenging times, we grow stronger and more connected as a behavioral medicine community and that we find innovative paths to move forward. We are all in this together and I think we can enhance our resilience by sharing our experiences and actions as well as leaning into our alliances and community.

There have been three themes I have been hearing from my colleagues and the organizations I am involved with: 1) Resist and Fight, 2) Engage and Persuade, and 3) Pivot and Persevere.  I find pros and cons to all of these approaches. I also find some more compelling depending on the circumstances or options under consideration. I am not sure there is a “right” way but I do think this is an important time for all of us to ask ourselves how we can contribute so that science is open and robust and science priorities are driven by scientists and the evidence.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to and serve SBM but it is particularly meaningful to do so now. The level of member engagement and thoughtful discourse about what we should and can do just blows me away.  I want to share some of the more recent activities of SBM as examples. SBM is closely tracking the policy landscape and rapidly expanding our coalitions and partnerships for advocacy (e.g., sign-on to letters to Congress, joining the Coalition for Health Funding, providing expert input to our advocacy coalitions such as FABBS). We are taking on several new opportunities to engage directly with policy makers (e.g., 11 new policy ambassadors in training and multiple new policy priority topics focusing on threatened areas of science). We launched a new advocacy update email and are holding Op Ed training for over 50 SBM members.  We affirmed our core values including our steadfast commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). One example of this commitment was declining an NIH R13, the conference grant that has helped support our Annual Meeting since 2014, because of moral, ethical, and scientific conflicts with new policies that prohibit activities related to DEI. These are just a few of the highlights. There are also a few other actions in the works at SBM that I am hopeful we will roll out soon.

I am humbled and grateful to be part of all of the SBM discussions, activities, and plans for the future. Having tangible actions I can take to fight for science has helped me stay anchored to hope rather than despair. I hope each of you are finding communities of action, including through SBM, to share your experiences, discuss ways to maintain progress and innovation in science, and take action where you feel it is appropriate. If you want to share your challenges or have ideas for new partnerships and action for SBM you can submit them here. If you want to volunteer, you can check out the volunteer impact hub.