Understanding the Other Side of Research

April 1, 2018, by Pamela C. Birriel, Ph.D.

For over seven years, the Office of Cancer Genomics (OCG) has supported recent doctoral graduates through internship and fellowship programs. This past September, I became the newly appointed Health Communications Fellow for OCG through a Cancer Research Training Award under the Health Communications Internship Program (HCIP). The HCIP provides highly qualified graduate students and recent graduate degree recipients the opportunity to participate in vital health and science communications projects through host offices at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Applicants are required to have some science background and experience and/or education in at least one of the following areas: public health, epidemiology, public relations, health education, communications, science writing, statistics, social marketing, and/or journalism. After the eight-week selection process, fellows are offered either a six-month or one-year full-time internship with the possibility of renewal for a second-year term.

HCIP offers enrichment opportunities through a professional development series of events. Trainings include Managing Up: How to Be Effective with Your Boss, Giving and Receiving Feedback Effectively, and To the Point: Make an Impact by Saying Less. ‘Brown Bags’ are also held throughout the first year as networking events providing the opportunity to interact in a casual environment with individuals from the NCI Presidential Management Fellows program. As part of the HCIP, I was assigned a mentor and a supervisor within OCG, who function as an advisor and day-to-day point of contact, respectively—both also sharing their knowledge and setting fellowship performance expectations that help progress towards my defined goals and objectives at the NCI.

Before coming to the NCI, I had recently earned my Ph.D. degree in Public Health and, prior to that, received an M.P.H. in Global Health Practice with a graduate certificate in Disaster Management from the University of South Florida in Tampa. I also received a B.S. in Exercise Science from Florida State University in Tallahassee and became a Certified Health Education Specialist in 2015. My doctoral dissertation focused on understanding Latina breast cancer survivors’ perceptions of the importance of diet and nutrition in helping them cope with the effect of cancer treatment and survivorship. My research study revealed unmet information needs; Latina breast cancer survivors relied on organizational and online nutrition-related resources but identified a gap in culturally and linguistically tailored information related to diet and nutrition following diagnosis. Understanding the limitations that individuals face in their ability to function in daily life roles through cancer survivorship heightened my interest and influenced my decision to come to the NCI.

While in the doctoral program, I was also employed as Project Coordinator of the Florida Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program evaluation. The Florida MIECHV initiative is funded by a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration with the goal of improving health and developmental outcomes for at-risk children through evidence-based home visiting programs. Our evaluation team was required to collect data and submit quarterly performance reports which served to assist the Maternal and Child Health Bureau in monitoring our grant and providing oversight. Throughout my four years working on the MIECHV program evaluation, I came to understand how organizations apply for, meet the requirements of, and report on federal research funding and competitive grants. My current position at the NCI now affords me a glimpse of how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award and monitor the success of grants and contracts distributed to the extramural research community and help to disseminate the information achieved through such awards—the other side of the spectrum. As part of the OCG team, I currently collaborate with OCG program managers in supporting innovative scientific programs.

OCG aims to advance the molecular understanding of cancer by funding and managing national and international cancer genomics and translational research programs, with the goal of improving clinical outcomes, and thereby contributing to precision medicine. OCG currently supports four collaborative programs: the Cancer Genome Characterization Initiative (CGCI), Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET), Cancer Target Discovery and Development (CTD²), and the Human Cancer Models Initiative (HCMI). My responsibilities as Health Communications Fellow include managing and creating website content; collaborating with OCG program managers on updating guidelines and manuals; interpreting website engagement analytics; and developing topics, writing articles, and editing the OCG e-Newsletters. I also collaborate with the Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG) Communications team regarding the development of video tutorials, tweets for the NCI Genomics Twitter page, and posts for the Insights and Innovations Blog.

Throughout the past seven months, I have become actively involved in assisting with communications initiatives for the CTD² program. CTD² is a collaborative Network of 12 research teams called Centers. Through robust cross-Network collaborations, the Network Centers use a combination of computational and experimental approaches to advance cancer research by translating large-scale genomic datasets into clinically-relevant information. For this program, I attend monthly steering committee teleconferences where presentations are given by each Center on a rotating basis to provide updates on their research. I also work closely with the CTD² Dashboard and Data Harmonization Informatics Portal working groups. Through my OCG tasks and communications activities, I have come to better understand extramural federal grants from the award and management end.

My passion in the field of public health stemmed from my drive to help underserved and vulnerable populations through culturally and linguistically tailored health education programs. From my experience so far as part of the OCG team, my future career goals entail working in a government research-entity, ideally NIH, that would provide me the opportunity to develop targeted research and subsequently implement and manage specific programs. My current 12-month Health Communications Fellowship is just a starting off point to improving my understanding of cancer genomics research, bioinformatics, and precision medicine. It is important for me, through the HCIP, to build upon the community-based and analytic research skills I have attained as an evaluator in Florida and apply that knowledge to my work and collaboration activities at the OCG. I am now eager to continue contributing to research that will ultimately improve the health of the people in the cancer community for years to come.