Occupational Health Psychology Training

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The Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) graduate training program at the University of Connecticut (UConn) is designed to recruit and train highly qualified and diverse graduate students from areas of psychology, public health and nursing to become Ph.D. researchers capable of conducting multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research focusing on the behavioral aspects of occupational health. A number of occupational trends (e.g., downsizing, contingent labor and long work hours, telework) have propelled the need for studies on OHP. OHP is concerned with the broad range of exposures and mechanisms that affect the quality of working life and the responses of workers, such as how individual psychological attributes interact with job content and work organization as well as organizational policies and practices. OHP research and practice explores interventions targeting the work environment as well as the individual to create healthier workplaces and organizations, and to improve the capacity of workers to protect their safety and health and also to maximize their overall effectiveness and sense of wellbeing. As such, OHP fits many of the strategic goals of the NIOSH Total Worker Health® initiative. Trainees are recruited from UConn's I/O doctoral program, which is the only one of its kind in the New England states, making it possible to recruit stellar students for this training. Trainees learn how to contribute to the OHP knowledge base and become highly capable at discovering and/or implementing new ways of maintaining and promoting worker health and safety. The OHP concentration is integrated within the Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology doctoral training program, which follows a scientist-practitioner model. All trainees complete a graduate seminar that covers principles of behavioral science, ergonomics and epidemiology and which requires development of a multidisciplinary research proposal. In addition, trainees complete an additional required epidemiology course and minimally two elective graduate courses in psychology and/or public health; research-wise, they complete minimally three credits of applied field or lab research under the supervision of OHP faculty, master- and dissertation-level research, and participate in faculty research labs. This combination of course content and applied research training is designed not only to equip trainees with the necessary skills to address today's occupational health problems, but also to enable them to introduce new concepts of work organization and workplace design for enhancing worker health and productivity beyond current expectations, thus realizing the true potential of trans-disciplinary occupational health research to meet both regional and national needs. Trainees get jobs in academia, industry, consulting firms and governmental agencies. Students outside the I/O Psychology program can also elect to complete the 15-credit program to obtain a Graduate Certificate in OHP.