About Our Department
Global Leaders
Chair, Department of Family & Community Health
The Family and Community Health (FCH) department also defines our community as a global one. With our longstanding participation in the Global Network of World Health Organization of Collaborating Centers for Nursing and Midwifery Development, we can look to carefully crafted community-based participatory research to affect change.
The Department’s commitment to enhancing the experiences of families and communities leads inexorably to its commitment to diversity - diversity of thought, of experiences, and a faculty dedicated to eliminating the disparities that plague our health and educational systems.
It also leads to our unique emphasis on historical methods to understand, challenge and change the systems we have inherited from the past as we look to a more just and equitable future.
We also have a long tradition of interprofessional leadership in our teaching, research and practice. And we now seek the same in our education of students who will assume new roles in a changing healthcare environment.
Starting the Conversation: Implications of Generative AI for Gerontology
Recently, Penn Nursing and the Penn Artificial Intelligence and Technologies Collaboratory for Healthy Aging (PennAITech) – funded by the National Institute on Aging – invited experts from academia, industry, and government to participate in a two-day (December 5-6, 2023) roundtable discussion to discuss challenges and opportunities in the use of Large language models (LLMs) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in gerontology. LLMs and the platforms they support such as ChatGPT have experienced an exponential growth in popularity and use in recent months.
