Ben Culp

Head Research Assistant

What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?

While I’m not an expert, as a research assistant I am responsible for many of the participant-facing aspects of running a study. RAs recruit participants, conduct their lab visits, answer their questions, and guide them through the study. In the past I have primarily worked in patient care roles, which is not too dissimilar to working with research participants. Making sure they are informed, comfortable, and enthusiastic about taking part in the study are some of our top priorities.

What do you find challenging or exciting about interdisciplinary collaboration?

Our study deals with a number of disciplines, from social structures to metrics of physiological health. It’s a unique environment that enables me to learn and read about a broad array of subjects which ultimately come together to reveal insights about sociological structures.

What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel?

It’s an outdated perspective, but I think some people still imagine research in the social sciences to be less rigorous or even less substantive than the natural sciences. This is far from the truth. Especially in our case, core sciences are where the research begins; in addition to subjects like biology, statistics, and other ‘traditional’ fields, social research requires that we look beyond what is observable.

 How did you become interested in social factors and health? 

My primary interests and professional endeavors are in health. Allopathic medicine is exceptional for acute care and even addressing chronic issues, but factors further upstream may have an equally if not more significant effect on our health. Social factors must be researched and understood in order for it to be addressed successfully.

What’s the academic path that brought you to where you are now?

I am interested in mental and physical health, and in psychology. As an undergraduate I majored in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience, which allowed me to learn deeply about these aforementioned interests along with the other ‘core’ sciences necessary for a pre-medical education.

If you had the opportunity to get one question answered by an omniscient being, what would you ask? (this is meant to be a lighthearted question–we’re trying to get to the heart of what you are most curious about, whether within your field of research or beyond! Feel free to think big!)

Putting aside questions about existence or the universe (which I’d love to have answered), I’d probably have to ask an omniscient being to tell me whatever I’d most like to know. To slightly adapt the immortal words of an author I love, I’d hope to be astonished by I don’t know what.