Search
Logo for the Nova Institute
DONATE

2024 – 2025 Annual Report

Cultivating the Conditions for Health

Download the Full Report

How Can We Spark Collaborations That Lead to Actionable Solutions?

Our Scholars and Fellows program supports preeminent thought leaders and emerging innovators actively pursuing bold solutions to transform how we understand and promote health. Hailing from diverse fields including medicine, photobiology, atmospheric chemistry, epidemiology, psychology, and more, these pioneers break down traditional barriers as they interact, driven by curiosity and exploration in ways that lead to fruitful partnerships.

The magic of Nova is that it’s not all linear thinking. We play in that space between reality and what’s possible. The realm of imagination can take us to a future that we want.

Sue Berman, Executive Director

Spotlight

Food and nutrition have long been focus areas for Nova, from integrating healthy cooking into medical school curricula to building healthy eating habits for communities to highlighting the negative impacts of ultra-processed foods. Many of these challenges begin even further upstream with a global food system that’s rooted in disconnection and domination.

Hannah Gosnell, PhD, who joined us as a Nova Scholar in 2025, studies regenerative agriculture and explores how to transform exploitative frameworks into conscious food systems that ensure human and ecological health, cultural vitality, and social justice.

“The global food system is driving some of the planet’s most urgent crises — from biodiversity loss and climate change to soil erosion, pollution, animal suffering, and human health problems,” Dr. Gosnell says. “How can we transform food systems into systems of reciprocity, regeneration, and care for nature and people?”

Dr. Gosnell’s work stems from a belief that collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to conservation challenges involving all affected stakeholders are likely to be more durable and equitable than ones that are topdown or purely technical. As a professor in Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Dr. Gosnell conducts her work on rural, agricultural, working landscapes involving both public and private lands in the American West. Her Nova project will explore new paradigms of environmental governance and levers for transformative change toward a more just and sustainable world.

Spotlight

Early childhood has a profound effect on neurological development and flourishing, and emerging research increasingly shows that positive childhood experiences can benefit lifelong health. By valuing children and their future health as adults, parents, and decision-makers can have an exponentially positive impact on societal, intergenerational, and planetary health.

Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH, joined us as a Nova Scholar in 2024 and is committed to advancing the new science of thriving to promote the early and lifelong health of children and families. Her research focuses on building and translating the science of healthy development and the application of family-centered data and tools to inform and drive positive systems improvements.

“Ensuring that every child is healthy, ready to learn, and on their optimal trajectory to a positively engaged adulthood is imperative for our nation and the planet,” says Dr. Bethell, professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine. “Many advances in science, technology, and human consciousness and awareness can be leveraged to meet this moment of transformation in society.”

Building on Nova’s longstanding track record of advancing a positive, whole-child approach to public health and health care for youth and families, Dr. Bethell will collaborate with other Nova Scholars and Fellows to further sustainable partnerships, policies, and practices with a focus on promoting early relational health and positive childhood experiences in the home, school, and community.

Spotlight

Effective public policy and lifelong flourishing go hand in hand. Decades of research show that environmental factors can affect adolescent brain development, influencing mental, behavioral, and physical health. These findings are inherently actionable for decision-makers, making it more important than ever to create nationwide support for legislative and institutional changes that support early childhood health.

Diana Fishbein, PhD, joined us as a Nova Scholar in 2024, bringing more than 40 years of deep expertise in the fields of prevention science, neuroscience, and behavioral science with her research supported by numerous federal agencies and national foundations.

Dr. Fishbein, a senior scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will lead a coordinated effort to work with Congress and the National Institutes of Health on strategies prioritizing youth health and well-being, expanding upon Nova’s previous interdisciplinary work in these fields.

“We are working collectively at all levels to create the political and public will to elevate whole child health and well-being in our discourse, practices, systems, and policies,” she says. “By proclaiming the next ten years as the Decade of the Child, we can create an impetus for a shift to improved health and well-being for our children founded on an accumulation of knowledge, evidence, and best practices.”

Dr. Fishbein is already working closely with other Nova Scholars and Fellows, including Dr. Bethell, on developing new evidence-based interventions in addition to leading a public education and outreach campaign to highlight the importance of federal investment in health.

A Space to Co-Create New Possibilities: Scholars & Fellows Meeting

Our annual Scholars and Fellows meeting in Baltimore is a time for the Nova community to reflect, share, and explore innovative ways of thinking. Our 2025 gathering was the largest ever, sparking dialogue and inspiration within our expanding network.

  • john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke about the need for bridging and community building to combat systemic injustices and polarization.
  • Nova Scholar Osagie K. Obasogie shared the results of his research into the legacy of eugenics in science, medicine, and technology in academic institutions.
  • Our media panel, moderated by Nova Media Advisory Council member and Science magazine correspondent Richard Stone, discussed the changing media landscape and the rise of the creator ecosystem. Panelists included Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Ashwath Narayanan of Social Currant, and Amanda Yarnell of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Meeting the Moment: Influencing Public Dialogue

Nova Scholars and Fellows are responding to the rapidly changing federal health policy landscape by sharing their evidence-based research in the media.

Nova Scholar Steven Woolf, MD, MPH, offered a data-driven view of how federal cuts will affect research and public health in the New York Times, reaching the paper’s millions of paid subscribers.

Nova Scholar Diana Fishbein, PhD, highlighted the value of federal investment in the field of addiction science, drawing connections to the societal value of interdisciplinary research in the Chicago Tribune.

See all publications

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.