In the Georgia State University Research Magazine’s “Divided We Fall,” Second Century Initiative faculty members John Horgan and Anthony Lemieux are among the TCV group who discuss political extremism in the United States following the Jan. 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol building, and what it will take to chart a different course.
Research by a faculty member hired under the Next Generation Program’s predecessor, the Second Century Initiative (2CI), shows that the COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on the learning gains of metro Atlanta’s students.
Paid sick leave (PSL) mandates like those found in the federal government’s Families First Coronavirus Response Act may be helping to slow the spread of COVID-19, according to a new study by a Second Century Initiative (2CI) health economist at Georgia State and his colleague at Tulane University.
Georgia State University faculty have joined the race to unravel how novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) operates and find effective treatments.
Faculty members are attacking the questions from the biomedical standpoint through work by virologists in the university’s Institute for Biomedical Sciences, epidemiological expertise through the School of Public Health, disease detector investigators through the Center for Diagnostics and Therapeutics, and more.
These researchers include faculty of the university’s Second Century Initiative (2CI), the predecessor program to the Next Generation Program, which seeks to build excellence in research and scholarship. Christopher Basler and Gerardo Chowell, both hired under 2CI, are making significant contributions to virology and epidemiology respectively.
Public Health Professor Gerardo Chowell, a faculty member of the university’s Second Century Initiative (2CI), the predecessor to the Next Generation Program, has been quoted in local media regarding novel coronavirus during the COVID-19 pandemic and is creating updated coronavirus incidence forecasts.
Timothy D. Lytton, Distinguished University Professor & Professor of Law, spoke on a panel on the topic of “Guns, Torts, and Market Regulation,” at Duke University Law School, sponsored by the Duke University Center for Firearms Law. Lytton provided a historical overview of lawsuits against gun manufacturers and retail sellers dating back to the 1990s, and he provided an analysis of current cases against gun makers arising out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Las Vegas mass shootings.
Robert Fairman is a 2CI Fellow at Georgia State in the Tobacco Center for Regulatory Science. Regulatory science is an arm of research that aims to develop new tools, standards, and to assess the safety, efficacy, quality, and performance of FDA-regulated policies—tobacco regulatory science helps the FDA inform regulations and policies they create regarding tobacco products. Fairman works within the health behavioral area of this informative process.
“I am a social and behavioral epidemiologist. Epidemiology is the study of diseases: how they spread, what causes them, and their outcomes. Simply, social epidemiology is looking at what social structures are more or less likely to cause an outcome.”
Arriving this past summer, Fairman did research on the modification of vaping devices—now he does research at Georgia State on the implications of vaping, and the use of other tobacco products. The recent headlines regarding vaping-related illness or death is a cause of concern for Fairman.
More than half of the homeless youth in metro Atlanta have experienced human trafficking, with minority and LGBTQ youth being more likely to be forced into working against their will, according to a study by Georgia State University sociology professor Eric Wright, a Second Century Initiative faculty member.
“Our data suggest that, at least among the homeless, they’re more likely to be trafficked for their labor and less frequently for commercial sexual exploitation,” said Wright, the principal investigator of the project. “Only one out of four youth were engaging in sex work of some sort, trafficked or otherwise. The vast majority of youth trafficking experiences involved a wide range of different kinds of labor trafficking.”
“They tend to be black or African American, more often are LGBTQ youth, and tend to be youth who have been in the juvenile justice or foster care system previously,” Wright said.
Anderson found herself at Georgia State in 2012 when the university was searching for a legal scholar to research health disparities related to socioeconomic determinants of health.
During a clinical fellowship at Georgetown, Anderson had worked with low-income tenants who wanted to purchase their building and the low-income issues they had faced during these kinds of processes. Considering her additional real-estate background, Anderson said the area of research was a perfect fit for her. Her research right now is focusing on bioethics and health disparities to prepare for the course she will be teaching, as well as an article on the opioid crisis, and how housing, neighborhoods and housing structure intersects with it.”
“I’m trying to offer a different perspective on what a lot of people are talking about, and what a lot of people are looking at.”
Neuroscientists at Georgia State University are using large-scale imaging analysis to study how symptoms associated with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression relate to changes in the brain. The researchers say they hope to yield new diagnostic classifications, uncover potential new treatment targets in the brain and identify which patients may benefit from those treatments.
The team, led by the Second Century Initiative’s Jessica Turner, professor of psychology and neuroscience, and Vince Calhoun, Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS), will examine two so-called “negative” symptoms, anhedonia (loss of pleasure) and asociality (loss of interest in social engagement), in patients with schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder. The work is supported by a five-year, $5 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
