
The fall semester was an exciting, eventful time at CHIP.
In September, the University announced the nationally renowned Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity is moving from Yale University to UConn, where it will become a center-within-a-center at CHIP. The alignment between UConn and Rudd provides a new platform for researchers to elevate their work on obesity and to make the University a leader in this area. This month, the Rudd Center, including its four core faculty members and nine of its research staff members, will move to its new home at Hartford’s Constitution Plaza, near UConn’s Graduate Business Learning Center and within close proximity to the state legislature.
During the fall semester, CHIP developed four innovative proposals for interdisciplinary health behavior change research in response to the University’s new Academic Vision, which prioritizes health and wellness research. The proposals, one of which would turn the entire Storrs campus into a health behavior change research laboratory, involve a variety of new hard-science partners, including the Schools of Engineering and Pharmacy.
CHIP also held two research networking events designed to foster more new collaborations – the first between researchers at CHIP and the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center (CCMC) and the second between researchers at CHIP and UConn Health’s Psychiatry Department. Both events launched new seed grant competitions for dual-Principal Investigator (PI) teams, where one researcher is from CHIP and the other is from CCMC and Psychiatry respectively. Letters of intent to apply for the joint seed grants were due in early December with full applications due Feb. 6th. The winners will be announced later in the spring semester.
2014 was a very good year for CHIP and we owe all our success – in 2014 and every year – to our wonderful Principal Investigators and our amazing administrative staff! I look forward to an equally productive new year.
Best Regards,
Jeff Fisher
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Psychology
Director, Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP)