Susan Howard, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor in the School of Integrative Studies, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, will deliver the keynote address, “Gaming to Uncover Unseen Links Between People, Animals, and Ecosystems,” at Colorado State University’s One Health Day Celebration on Thursday, November 6, 2025, in Fort Collins, CO.
Professor Howard’s keynote will spotlight her applied and pedagogical research at GMU on game-based, participatory, and systems-thinking approaches to understanding and addressing One Health challenges. This includes The Loop Trail Quest (Environmental Communication, 2021), which demonstrated how seemingly benign human behaviors can increase disease risk through chains of events that are often unseen. Her talk will show how games can make these invisible chains visible—for example, how litter that traps water can raise mosquito-borne disease risk, or how going off trail can disrupt predator–prey relationships and indirectly increase Lyme exposure—highlighting how everyday behaviors can create “self-inflicted” One Health harms, and how changing behavior can reduce them.
Howard’s scholarship and practice—recognized in 2025 through GMU’s Presidential Social Impact Award—also draw from her leadership in game-based innovations at Howard Delafield International (HDI), where her team’s award-winning games and AI-enabled tools have been used to engage adolescents and vulnerable populations in health and environmental decision-making in real-world settings.
While at CSU, Professor Howard will also meet with CSU’s One Health student club and with public health and medical students to share game demos, storyline and design processes, core game mechanics, and evidence of impact from her applied projects. The session will introduce games not only as an instructional strategy, but as a practical method students can use to prototype, test, and adapt game-based approaches to their own One Health challenges.
October 30, 2025