March Message from the Directors: Looking to the future
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CCTS is planning for the future! After 15 years of successfully driving translational research, we are beginning the transition to our next phase. We will continue to stay true to our mission of accelerating health-related research breakthroughs and bringing them into practice and policy faster, while advancing a diverse clinical translational science workforce to help promote health equity. But moving forward, we will shift our focus away from clinical translational research to clinical translational science, streamline our services and resources to be more efficient, effective and user-friendly, and a place a greater emphasis on outcomes and impact across a variety of spheres.
This shift requires us to rethink our existing structure and operations and, instead, focus on organizing around these emerging needs. To accomplish this strategic redesign, we will follow some “tried and true” principles of human centered design and engage our stakeholders at every step. These stakeholders include our staff, faculty and trainee researchers, research personnel, health care system representatives, community and patient representatives, and our public health community partners.
We will ask each of these groups: what they need to help advance clinical translational science; what pain points are and challenges they are experiencing when conducting or using clinical translational research and findings; how they prefer to work with us; and what suggestions they may have for the future CCTS. Through this process of engagement and dialogue, we hope to better identify a core set of challenges that we will work to address over the next several years.
While we have great pride in our past accomplishments, we have new challenges to solve amid everchanging scientific landscapes and social contexts. We, too, need to evolve to be more nimble, responsive, and reflective of our stakeholder needs. This process of evolution will require that we keep all lines of communication open and flowing, and we want to encourage feedback and suggestions from the UIC research community. Please feel free to send any thoughts or suggestions our way.