Personas for the translational workforce

Abstract

Twelve evidence-based profiles of roles across the translational workforce and two patients were made available through clinical and translational science (CTS) Personas, a project of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program National Center for Data to Health (CD2H). The persona profiles were designed and researched to demonstrate the key responsibilities, motivators, goals, software use, pain points, and professional development needs of those working across the spectrum of translation, from basic science to clinical research to public health. The project’s goal was to provide reliable documents that could be used to inform CTSA software development projects, educational resources, and communication initiatives. This paper presents the initiative to create personas for the translational workforce, including the methodology, engagement strategy, and lessons learned. Challenges faced and successes achieved by the project may serve as a roadmap for others searching for best practices in the creation of Persona profiles.

Bridging the gap: A library‐based collaboration to enhance data skills for clinical researchers

“…9 Since the system is designed to work with any research output type and can also be integrated with third‐party tools such as GitHub 10 and Jupyter Notebooks, preservation of NMEDW research reports is an ideal use case for this system. This work is part of our orchestrated efforts to enrich the sociotechnical environment at Northwestern through projects to improve communication and training for the clinical and translational workforce, 11 , 12 properly attribute contributors of research outputs, enhance data practice and security workflows, and incorporate standards and persistent identifiers throughout. Some cRDM workshops (notably “Making Your Data FAIR” and “Sharing and Preserving Biomedical Data”) incorporate InvenioRDM to introduce best practices in data sharing.…”

Enhancing translational team effectiveness: The Wisconsin Interventions in Team Science framework for translating empirically informed strategies into evidence-based interventions

“…Intervention developers do not need to start from scratch in understanding the needs of Translational Teams and the context in which they operate. For example, the Clinical and Translational Science Personas project has described key aspects of those working in CTR 27 . The SciTS literature, too, has described key influences on science team functioning, such as attitudes towards collaboration, leadership, trust, and incentives to collaborate, that can serve as background for the needs assessment.…”

“…Identify and assess the characteristics, needs, and challenges. Assessing the needs of translational scientists and teams can be achieved using quantitative and qualitative data collected through needs assessments or structured observation [26]. An important component of this phase is convening a group of stakeholders to define and understand the problem space of interest, taking the ecosystem perspective-discovering needs of the priority population (individuals), the teams in which they operate, and the institution/institutional multiteam system that may influence the implementation of the intervention.…”

Clinical and Translational Science Personas: Expansion and use cases

“…Our methodology in 2019 [5] involved three phases: Identify key CTS roles Identify required elements for outlining Personas (Fig. 1) Develop the Persona profiles based on information retrieved from literature searches and interviews …”