Health and Behavioral Sciences

Dear Prospective Students,

Welcome to the Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences! We are a department that includes Psychology, Community Health, Public Health, and Genomics.

Our department is unique because of its strong research focus. Our largest student program is Psychology, with about 500 majors and 300 minors.  This program has opportunities for students to participate in research in classes as well as in directed study programs with faculty members. Many of these projects have been presented and conferences and published. Psychology’s exciting topics of our research include facial recognition applied to detecting fake IDs, eyewitness identification, voting behavior, reasons people use online dating apps, physical and psychological pain in invertebrate animals, patient-physician relationships, humility among physicians, and tattoos in the workplace.

The Community Health and Genomics program consists of a Community Health degree program, and the Public Health Genetics and Genomics Group (PHGGG). The community health program has studied shared cultural norms (i.e. ‘cultural consonance’), family support (‘familismo’), and Type 2 diabetes. This research is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Lyssa Ochoa at the San Antonio Vascular and Endovascular (SAVE) clinic.

The Public Health Genetics and Genomics Group (PHGGG) is a team of experts focused on genetics and genomics of rare and common complex disorders to meet the critical needs of the San Antonio Community. Much of their research efforts have been directed toward the discovery of genetic and environmental factors influencing metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular and gallbladder disease and their comorbid conditions.  Much of their work has been funded by the NIH.

Cross-disciplinary projects include a 3-year grant from Texas Health and Human Services awarded to Psychology, Community Health, and Kinesiology to provide a fun, evidence-based program entitled BINGOCIZE™ (that combines Bingo with gentle physical activity and range of motion exercises) to more than twenty Certified Nursing Facilities in Bexar and surrounding counties in an effort to decrease falls and improve the quality of life of our state’s rapidly growing senior population.

Our department is proud of the incredible research projects and student opportunities that we are able to offer, and we hope you will want to learn more about what we do!

Thank you,
Dr. Amy Bohmann
Associate Professor of Psychology
Chair, Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences