This fall, the College of Human Ecology will open the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR), an initiative that will merge two longstanding and successful college centers: the Family Life Development Center and the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center. The BCTR will place the college in the vanguard of one of the most dynamic and exciting recent developments in the scientific community translational research as a means to link research with outreach and education.
The BCTR will operate as a “living laboratory” for the extension of research-based knowledge into practice and policy settings and for the incorporation of problems from those domains into researchers’ agendas.
In the spirit of its namesake, Urie Bronfenbrenner, the new Bronfenbrenner Center will bridge the gap between research and practice, helping Human Ecology to solve a problem that exists both at Cornell and in society at large. Too often, practitioners view research as esoteric and irrelevant, while researchers perceive application as trivial and unscientific.