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UH professor tackles asthma, undergraduate research

Dan Price, Honors College faculty member and author of Touching Difficulty: Sacred Form from Plato to Derrida hosted’ a forum’ Thursday where 16 health experts from Galveston, Houston, and Baylor College of Medicine attended to speak on the subject of asthma.

Price said the roundtable wass not restricted to people who have asthma. The discussion focused on public health, issues, scientific research, and what it means to address problems like asthma from within different perspectives in the University.

‘This project responds to several priorities at the Honors College and the University,’ Price said. ‘It emphasizes undergraduate research both by bringing potential mentors together with students and by providing opportunities for non-mentored research.’

In addition to this free informative session, a new research course will be offered Spring 2010 on asthma, titled Asthmatic Spaces: Houston/New York.

‘The Asthmatic Spaces Houston/New York project pushes into new ground, moreover, because it really emphasizes the creative possibilities of collaboration within new technological platforms,’ Price said. ‘The Asthma Files is a larger web-based project for hosting information on the variety of approaches to air quality, environmental justice, public health, pharmacology, biology and social science approaches to asthma.’

Among the experts who attended the roundtable are Elena Marks and Winnie Hamilton.

Marks is in charge of the environmental policy under Mayor Bill White. She spoke of the benefits of science to produce innovative ways to address the problems of pollution and public health.

Hamilton, the director of the Institute of Environmental Health at BCM spoke of new places in Houston where students can actively participate in learning about asthma and the surrounding environment.

Other discussions included the complexities of biological issues and medical concerns in science.

‘The RPI department of Science and Technology Studies is trailblazing in its efforts to understand how science works, and what it means for innovation to arise from creative collaboration,” Price said.’ ‘Their participation is especially important, as they provided the conceptual groundwork for exploring asthma as a problem area to which a large variety of different sciences could respond.’

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