The Clinical and Translational Sciences Center (CTSC) at Thomas Jefferson University’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College is taking another major step forward, with leadership now in place to guide four core areas essential to the CTSC’s mission of accelerating discoveries into patient care.
The core leaders have been named to guide work in informatics, community engagement, training, and the combined areas of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design. Together, their work will support the infrastructure researchers need to develop stronger studies, access and use data, connect with communities, advance their careers, and collaborate across disciplines.
For the leaders themselves, much of that work isn’t entirely new. They bring experience developing similar resources within Jefferson, particularly through Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center (SKCCC), one of only 58 National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the country. The CTSC creates an opportunity to expand those strengths and extend them to researchers across the institution.
“We’re used to collaborating from our existing linkages within SKCCC,” says Chris McNair, PhD, chief research informatics officer at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, who also leads the Informatics Core. “The CTSC allows us to leverage connectivity that already exists and expand on the population that we’re trying to support.”
Meet the Core Leaders Building Jefferson’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Center
They will help create the infrastructure researchers need to strengthen studies, use data, connect with communities, advance their careers, and collaborate across specialties.
(l-r) Amy Leader, DrPh, MPH; Chris McNair, PhD; Terry Hyslop, PhD; and Ben Leiby, PhD, will lead four core areas essential to the CTSC’s mission of accelerating discoveries into patient care.
Chris McNair, PhD, Informatics Core Leader
Making research data more accessible
Dr. McNair’s core focuses on data and informatics support, including helping researchers use electronic health record data and developing scalable, reproducible processes for accessing information.
Those capabilities could support retrospective research, clinical trials, and clinical trial matching, as well as other data-intensive research across Jefferson.
Dr. McNair has helped build similar infrastructure within SKCCC and says that many of the challenges cancer researchers face also affect investigators in other areas. “There’s a whole host of issues that are not specific to any one disease, but really are issues across the research continuum,” he says.
One of the first steps will be to learn more about researchers outside oncology and identify where the CTSC can have the greatest impact. Rather than assuming their needs are the same, Dr. McNair says, the team plans to connect with investigators to better understand their challenges.
Amy Leader, DrPh, MPH, Community Engagement Core Leader
Bringing research and communities together
Amy Leader, DrPh, MPH, who serves as associate director for community outreach and engagement at SKCCC, will lead the CTSC’s Community Engagement Core.
Her goal is to create a two-way connection: bringing community perspectives into Jefferson research while also bringing research opportunities and findings into the community.
That could include creating community, stakeholder, and patient advisory boards; training researchers to work effectively with community members; and preparing community members to review lay abstracts, comment on proposals, or participate in other aspects of the research process.
Researchers may recognize the value of community input but lack the relationships or knowledge to make those connections, Dr. Leader says. SKCCC has spent years developing trusted community partnerships that provide a foundation for the new core.
Terry Hyslop, PhD, Training Core Leader
Investing in the next generation of researchers
The Training Core, led by Terry Hyslop, PhD, vice chair of the Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Cancer Biology, is already supporting junior faculty members pursuing research careers.
Drawing on her previous experience mentoring faculty through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Career Development (K) award process, Dr. Hyslop started an informal “K club” at Jefferson. Participants meet regularly to discuss topics such as identifying mentors, choosing the appropriate type of K award, and developing competitive applications.
The team is now working to formalize that support, including developing a repository of sample grants and other resources and creating a system to track participating researchers, their goals, and their mentoring teams.
Another goal is to establish internal support that could give promising researchers protected time and funding to generate preliminary data before competing for external NIH awards.
“Junior investigators bring deep expertise in their individual fields, but navigating research funding and career development can be unfamiliar territory,” Dr. Hyslop says. “We can give them the benefits of our wisdom and things that we know have worked or not worked in the past.”
Ben Leiby, PhD, Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design Core Leader
Building stronger studies from the start
Ben Leiby, PhD, division head of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, leads the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design Core. The core will help investigators refine research questions, design studies, develop plans for data collection and analysis, and, when needed, carry out those analyses.
Like several of the CTSC’s other components, much of this work has already been happening at Jefferson. The new structure provides an opportunity to make that expertise more accessible across the institution.
Dr. Leiby sees this core as a connector. Because biostatisticians work with investigators at many points along the translational research spectrum, they can help researchers find collaborators with expertise they may not have within their own teams.
“The goal of CTSC is to connect people with each other and outside resources, rather than having people reinvent the wheel every time they need to do something,” he says. “Hopefully, we can break down silos and barriers in that way to advance clinical and translational research.”
The work has just begun for the CTSC core leaders. Over the coming year, they will focus on building teams, infrastructure, relationships, and strategic priorities.
Laying the groundwork
The core leaders emphasize that the CTSC remains in the early stages of development. Over the coming year, much of their work will involve forming teams, establishing infrastructure, strengthening relationships, and determining where resources can have the greatest impact.
But each leader already sees opportunities in what that infrastructure could make possible.
For Dr. Leiby, part of that potential lies in helping researchers take advantage of the breadth of information available across Jefferson’s growing health system. “We have really not even scratched the surface yet,” he says of the data available. Dr. Leiby also sees an opportunity to support investigators with promising ideas who previously lacked the resources to move them forward.
Dr. Leader is excited about creating stronger connections between those investigators and the people their research is ultimately intended to serve. “We have the opportunity to bring in so many different stakeholders, community members, patients, survivors, and family members to engage in the research that’s going on here,” she says.
For Dr. Hyslop, the CTSC is also opening the door to new disciplines and ideas. After years of mentoring researchers primarily within cancer, she’s now working with investigators pursuing a much broader range of questions. “I’m getting to see a really broad application of the kinds of research coming to Jefferson with these new clinical faculty,” she says. “I’m enjoying that aspect of things.”
And for Dr. McNair, the opportunity is to take support structures that have already benefited researchers within SKCCC and extend them to more investigators across Jefferson. “It’s exciting to me to be able to open up a whole new group of researchers to support, to learn about their work, and to have that same level of investment in pushing the research forward,” he says.
Together, those efforts represent the next phase of the CTSC: connecting researchers with the data, expertise, training, and communities they need while creating an infrastructure designed to support clinical and translational research across Jefferson.