Latest ‘Bostonia’ Delivers Musings on Life from George Annas and Roberta White, Profiles Alumna Nicole Daley ’08.

For a project called “What is Life,” George Annas and Roberta White joined four other experts across the BU academic spectrum in pondering mankind’s eternal question. 

Annas — a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, a professor at the Schools of Public Health, Law and Medicine, and chair of health law, bioethics, and human rights at SPH — donned his ethicist’s hat to consider what may be the newest alternate life-forms: large corporations. 

White — associate dean for research and professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Health at SPH, and professor of neuropsychology and behavioral neuroscience in the School of Medicine — examined the question with an acknowledgement that life may actually be an ill-defined continuum of being very much alive until that state changes to extremely dead.  

As director of the Boston Public Health Commission’s Start Strong initiative, Nicole Daley (SPH ’08) works to give 11- to 14-year-olds the skills to keep their relationships and their breakups healthy and safe, and to provide the resources so they can ask for help when they need it. In her three years driving the Start Strong initiative, Daley has attracted national press attention with events called “breakup summits.” Start Strong has also invited teenagers to rate the relationship healthiness and unhealthiness of popular song lyrics, with widely publicized results.

In 2011, she held the first national virtual breakup summit at BUSPH, joining teens from Boston with peers throughout the country: