Boggero Accepted into ORBIT Institute

Begin Date: 
Monday, March 27, 2023 - 1:15pm
Location: 
UKCD

Boggero

The University of Kentucky College of Dentistry (UKCD) congratulates Dr. Ian Boggero on being accepted into the ORBIT Institute as a fellow. The ORBIT Institute: Developing Behavioral Treatments to Improve Health is a NIH-funded short course that accepts 25 Fellows per year and trains them in behavioral intervention development for cancer prevention/treatment and related health behaviors.   

“As a clinician scientist, I am always seeking opportunities to improve the interventions I and my team deliver. The ORBIT institute will provide me cutting-edge skills for delivering the most scientifically rigorous behavioral health interventions,” shared Boggero.  

The ORBIT Institute consists of one in-person workshop and 10 bi-weekly webinars and webinar activities over the course of five months. Fellows will also have access to the ORBIT Institute’s resources as an ORBIT Scholar. When asked about how becoming an ORBIT Scholar helps him with his research, Boggero said, “My research to date has looked at how psychosocial factors like fatigue, depression, sleep, and social support predict chronic pain outcomes. However, I am now becoming more and more interested in asking a separate question: What can we do about it? As a clinician researcher, I think the ORBIT institute will help me bridge the gap from my previous research into actually using that knowledge to improve clinical care.”  

Speaking on what he is hoping to gain from his experience as a Fellow at the ORBIT Institute, Boggero stated, “I hope to develop tools that we can use to improve the quality of our current behavioral health treatments. Unlike medication treatments where you can blind the practitioners and the patients to the drugs they are administering/receiving, you cannot do that with behavioral health interventions. Thus, testing behavioral health interventions is in many ways more difficult than testing other medical procedures or medicines, and requires a very specialized toolset. By learning these tools, I hope we can continue learning about and refining our behavioral health repertoire, specifically for brief interventions to improve the management of chronic pain.”  

Boggero added, “I am really looking forward to forming collaborative relationships with the other behavioral interventionists there, and to learning all the theories and strategies which I plan to continue using in my research for years to come.” 

 
 
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