CSE Education Activities for 2010

CSE Staff and Consultants teach a Work and Health Course at UCLA one semester each year and have, over the last ten years, provided over 100 students with skills on conducting surveillance at the workplace and measurement of exposures and outcomes such as blood pressure.

The CSE sponsors a number of education activities including 1) a course at UCLA (Work and Health), 2) a course at UCI of Occupational Cardiology, 3) conferences and workshops in international settings, and 4) regular meetings of the  California Work and Health Study Group (last held this past May 2010 in Berkeley).

The Center is involved in the preparation and publication of scientific articles and books. CSE is proud to have had two books published during the past decade each with over 30 internationally recognized authors; the first, The Workplace and Cardiovascular Disease published by Hanley and Belfus in 2000 and the second, Unhealthy Work: Causes, Consequences, Cures published by Baywood in 2009. In 2010 book parties were held in Los Angeles and Berkeley to promote Unhealthy Work at which several of the books editors gave presentations.

The Center is excited to have just had Unhealthy Work translated by colleagues into Korean and Spanish. The Korean version was published in September 2010, Seoul, Korea by GyeChuk Mun Wha Sa (Publisher) while the University de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia is publishing the Spanish version edited by Dr. Viviola Gomez, Department of Psychology.

During 2010, CSE consultants have prepared multiple abstracts, some based on a pilot web survey of Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) firefighters conducted with colleagues at the UCI COEH. Several abstracts were accepted as oral presentations, a few others as poster presentations at the 4^th International Conference of Occupational Health (ICOH) Work Organization and Psychosocial Stressors (WOPS) conference in Amsterdam in June 2010.

Paul Landsbergis, consultant to the CSE, with Peter Schnall, recently published a book chapter on job strain and cardiovascular disease for the second edition of the Handbook of Occupational Health Psychology. He is in the process of working on several new manuscripts, including a meta-analysis of job strain and ambulatory blood pressure (in collaboration with Marnie Dobson and Peter Schnall of the CSE) and a study of job strain and masked hypertension. Additionally, Paul authored papers for the 2010 Global Obesity Summit recently held in Jackson, Mississippi.

BongKyoo Choi, consultant to the CSE, published papers on work and obesity during 2010 in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine and the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health.. His other research on work and obesity using a US national dataset was well received at the 2010 ICOH-WOPS conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Best Abstract Award and 2010 Global Obesity Summit, Jackson, MS (New Investigator Travel Award). In addition, he submitted a critical commentary to NIH on their draft strategies for research into obesity.

The Center also considers the education of the public one of its main goals. To support this aim, the Center’s Informations Systems Manager (ISM), Erin Wigger, moderates a network of health professionals through several listservs and manages a website using web design software (Dreamweaver).

Expansion of the ISM’s role at the Center includes broadening the Center’s fundraising efforts, the redesign of the Center’s Job Stress Network website as well as the creation and development of a blog and new website based on the Center’s recently published book, Unhealthy Work: Causes, Consequences, Cures, Baywood, 2009. This website represents the first of the Center’s efforts to begin presenting information on work and health to the lay-public.