No words or exclamation points or italic exaggerations typed across a screen can capture the power of real conversation. When you talk to someone, you can hear the passion in her voice.

As I spoke on the phone with Jennie Noll, director of Penn State’s Network on Child Protection and Well-Being, I heard the way she drew out her words as she conveyed childhood abuse’s serious, heartbreaking impacts on its victims. I heard the way she raised the pitch of her voice in excitement about the solutions that lie ahead.

As director of the Penn State Network on Child Protection and Well-Being, Jennie Noll meets with researchers across a multitude of disciplines on campus and around the world. Photo by Rachel Garman

“When you get together with someone who is studying what you study and who is passionate about what you are passionate about, that’s when the conversation can get exciting,” Noll said. “It can create new ways to solve problems and new ways to look at how we are going to make a difference in the lives of these kids.”

Noll has brought together scientists and practitioners to attend the conference tomorrow and Thursday and to spark conversation. The annual conference allows Noll and her colleagues to work together to translate their findings into real world solutions and treatments.

She has been researching child sexual abuse research for more than 20 years and conducts long-term studies that allow her to watch victims grow up. “I can see the lives of these people being impacted by their early abuse experience in ways that I can’t really fully describe.”

Her multidisciplinary approach to this area of research has put her in contact with some of the best endocrinology, brain development and epigenetics researchers in the world. It’s also landed her the position as the Network director.

“I had done some of the most relevant and long-term research on sex abuse victims,” Noll said. “So Penn State asked me to come and direct the Network and start this whole initiative.”

She and her research team are asking questions about various aspects of child abuse, including the psychology of abuse, the biology of abuse, the role of families and society and how abuse is treated and prevented. She’s searching for answers about how biology interacts with the environment and puts kids at risk of health problems.

“I really wanted to bring the people here who are doing the most cutting-edge, the most innovative and the most translatable research,” Noll said.

Some of the speakers are friends and former collaborators, but Noll stressed that for an event that is drawing a national audience, it was her responsibility to get the very best.

George Bonanno is one of the speakers presenting on reversibility and resilience – a field and an approach slightly outside of the rest of the speakers’ research.

He and Noll collaborated in studies on childhood sexual abuse victims that measured the costs and benefits of expressing positive emotion, observed anger expression and detected the meaning of different facial expressions in victims.

Between sessions of the conference, speakers will have the opportunity to sit down and talk. As old friends reminisce and catch up on each other’s work, new ideas can come together, Noll said.

Noll also hopes to start a way of communicating among scientists and practitioners. Community members, practitioners and others who care for these children firsthand will have the opportunity to tell scientists what they see and scientists in turn can answer the question of how we help these people.

“Instead of leaving science to the scientific journals or leaving the science behind the walls of the university,” Noll said, “this conference will take science to the people who use it.”