外刊阅读20240504｜重大研究空白已被发现！

+

上期划线句答案

+

本期内容

◆

双语阅读

Harvard’s Initiative on Health and Homelessness (IHH) is a rarity in the academic world—the first of its kind based at a school of public health, and one of only a handful of similar research centers at universities around the country. Almost all of them (including the IHH, which launched in 2019) are relatively new.

All this points to a problem. The contemporary homelessness crisis emerged in the 1980s, fully 40 years ago. Yet, as a public health emergency, it has remained largely overlooked in academia, even though, as IHH faculty chair Howard Koh points out, “Academia prides itself on taking on hard and complicated public health issues.”

The consequences of this absence, adds Koh, the Fineberg professor of the practice of public health leadership, are considerable: “The end result has been that students can come to a university like ours to study medicine or public health and never hear a single lecture , or never meet any faculty doing research in this field,” he says. “And then they get their degree, and they leave. And as they’re walking out, they pass homeless people on the street and have no idea how we, as a society, should address that challenge.”

In 2023, Roncarati co-authored a paper in the journal Public Health Reports titled, “Establishing Academic Homes for Homelessness: A Call to Action.” It was a collaboration among several Harvard-connected scholars, including Koh, and it argued, in part, that academia’s lack of attention to homelessness is tied to a bigger, deeper imbalance: in research funding. A huge number of the public health studies are supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With an annual budget of more than $45 billion, it is the world’s largest funder of biomedical and behavioral research. But homelessness doesn’t fit neatly into the agency’s structure.