Dive Brief:
- A $21 million donation by the Lee Kum Kee Family will establish the new Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
- The center will support research to identify psychological, social, and emotional strengths that may protect against disease and lead to longer, happier, and healthier lives.
- The center will focus on new research and compile previous information about the role of happiness and well-being in relation to physical health. It will also serve to coordinate research across departments and disciplines at Harvard University, including psychology, nutrition, exercise physiology, biology, medicine, epidemiology and population sciences.
Dive Insight:
Some of the initial efforts at the new center will focus on:
- Developing a "happiness index" to assess psychological well-being in a scientific and systematic manner. The tool could measure the effectiveness of targeted interventions in highly distressed groups in promoting greater happiness and better health.
- Defining the relationship between psychological well-being and cardiovascular health, healthy aging, and longevity.
- Measuring the effects of interventions promoting psychological well-being such as mindfulness-based practices and the potential benefits of these practices on diseases such as anxiety, bipolar disease, cancer, depression, and diabetes.
- Studying the role of communications, from television programming to social media, on engagement, health, and happiness.
David Hunter, acting dean of the Harvard Chan School said the new Center, "will develop evidence-based recommendations and interventions that can demonstrably improve the health and well-being of individuals and entire populations." He added that another goal of the center is to help set new medical practice and personal health priorities that lead to longer, healthier lives.