July Message from the Directors: Tackling translational barriers as a team
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At CCTS, we are now entering our more active renewal planning phase, which provides us the opportunity to be both reflective about our operations and performance and as well as visionary about how we want to move forward to maximize our impact. After 15 years of existence, we are ready to refresh, refine, and do a bit of remodeling as we get energized for our future. Our mission – enabling more treatments for more people more quickly – requires that we optimize our services and resources to be up-to-date, efficient, effective, and user-friendly. As always, we want to work alongside the research teams in a collaborative fashion and create processes and messages that enhance this collaborative ethos.
With this broader perspective of enhancing our input and collaboration with research teams, this month we launched our new consultative service, Research Ally. Research Ally consultations provide a collaborative, team-based approach to address a wide range of translational science challenges. Integral to this new approach are our research navigators, dedicated project contacts who listen to PIs’ unique study challenges and connect them with a personalized panel of peer scientists who can offer a range of potential strategies solutions.
With decades of collective experience, CCTS’s peer scientists who work with all of you in our cores and modules are one of our greatest assets. From pursuing interdisciplinary grants to advising on protocols for hard to reach populations to designing custom web-based applications for complex technology needs, their goal is to identify and address unforeseen challenges and opportunities at every stage of your project- helping advance your efforts along the translational pipeline.
The Research Ally model will allow us to better listen to our study teams, fully understand their project’s needs, and bring a fresh energy to help achieve their goals. And while we continue to pursue new means of emphasizing outcomes and impacts across a variety of health spheres, we remain committed first and foremost to the communities we serve. By acting as allies to our investigators, we enable them to become better allies to the people of Chicago and beyond.