SOH Program

To accelerate the transition towards sustainable healthcare and to help each person achieve their full potential, we need a Science of Health.

Over the last decades, both our health care system and the health sciences have largely focused on understanding, detecting, and treating diseases. In comparison, we know little about the basis of human health. What allows people to thrive, heal and remain healthy for decades?

The Columbia Science of Health (SOH) Program integrates faculty across disciplines to further both the theoretical and practical gaps in knowledge forestalling accurate and predictive measures of human health across the lifespan. Together, we aim to identify new principles and measures of human health, integrating its biological underpinnings to its realization within individual’s life and in society.

A Science of Health will catalyze a shift away from a focus on the presence or absence of disease and toward promotion of health holistically across the life course in ways that (1) transform how health is studied and measured in basic, clinical, and population research, (2) transform how health is monitored and promoted at the individual and population level, and (3) translate this new science of health into scalable and sustainable policy and societal-level interventions.

Long-term this framework will transform societies by offering clear benchmarks for both individual interventions and public policy, and by providing insight into the complex biological mechanisms that keep our bodies in dynamic equilibrium.