For years, in response to demand from the field, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Public Health Law Services (OPHLS) has partnered with outside organizations, including Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research and ChangeLab Solutions, to operate the Legal Epidemiology Learning Cohort (Learning Cohort). This year-long opportunity offers training and mentorship to health department practitioners and others from public health-adjacent settings on the practical steps of legal epidemiology, which includes collecting, mapping, and evaluating legal texts. Participants work in transdisciplinary teams to design and carry out the foundational work for completing projects on research questions relevant to local public health challenges. Throughout 2023, ChangeLab Solutions and OPHLS coordinated training sessions and provided technical assistance to seven Learning Cohort teams across the country. This paper provides an overview of the Learning Cohort’s background, approach, and lessons learned. It also spotlights three recent Learning Cohort teams who describe the projects they completed and the benefits and challenges they found in learning foundational legal epidemiology methods for their public health work. Featured projects demonstrate how legal epidemiology can be used to examine topics like water safety, Tribal access to public health data, and the intersection of state and local law.

Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs) produce educational content spanning the continuum of clinical and translational research. However, the way in which this content is organized should be standardized. We describe our methodology and process for re-organizing the content in our hub’s Online Educational Library (OEL) using eight clinical research professional competency domains. We also analyze data from our OEL on viewership and related factors. Users were more likely to watch videos that were newer and hosted on YouTube. The public availability of competency categories had mixed effects on viewership. We discuss the need to refine these categories to improve video viewership in CTSA OELs.

The 2025 report by the Association for Clinical Research Professionals summarizes the state of crisis for the global clinical research workforce and proposes key solutions. These include increased awareness of clinical research professions, access to jobs through expanded training and internships, and advancement opportunities for professional staff and site support. To increase access to these professions, multiple Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) expanded training programs and internships leveraging approaches described in this manuscript, and in some cases, established formal apprenticeships in their respective States. This manuscript summarizes direct experiences of nine Clinical and Translational Science Award Centers for decreasing the barriers to entry into the clinical research profession, specifically focusing on clinical research coordinator role. This special communication describes methods for increased awareness, establishing training/internship opportunities, while addressing internal and external collaborations, administrative barriers, and funding necessary to implement an innovative pathway program. The authors hope that this material will be valuable to other AMCs that wish to undertake development of similar programs.

Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hubs must advance implementation science via innovative approaches to understand and develop strategies for overcoming barriers to the adoption, adaptation, integration, scale-up, and sustainability of evidence-based interventions, tools, policies, and guidelines. This special communication describes adaption of the I-Corps™@NCATS training program, a Lean Start-Up approach developed to advance commercialization of academic innovation, as a mechanism for building implementation science capacity at the Institute for Translational Medicine, a Chicago-based multi-institutional CTSA hub. Results from seven training cohorts (2021–2025) are presented (43 teams, 157 participants). In this five-week experiential program, teams conducted “customer discovery” interviews with stakeholders (mean = 23.8/team, SD = 5.6) to rapidly assess fit-to-context of their innovation and adoption requirements. Likelihood of recommending the program to a colleague was high (8.9, SD = 1.5; 1–10 scale, where “10” = “extremely likely”). Important adaptations were providing non-commercial use cases; defining “customers” in terms of stakeholders and partners; reframing commercial business model goals in terms of designing-for-dissemination-and-sustainability; and showing how the value proposition hypothesis is analogous to a research hypothesis being tested and validated with “customer discovery” data. Findings support that the modified I-Corps@NCATS training program provides flexible translational science skill-building to advance implementation science capacity among clinical and translational researchers.

Clinical and translational science faces persistent challenges in public trust, effective communication, and siloed knowledge structures. Addressing these issues requires innovative educational and engagement strategies. We present an artist-in-residency program immersed into an undergraduate pathway program to integrate artwork as a tool to enhance science communication, foster public engagement, and build a resilient translational science workforce. Through structured art-science–community interactions, this initiative demonstrates how artistic practice builds a new collaborative communication framework for linking early-career scientists, clinical translational research faculty, and the broader community. The conceptual novelty of our science-art initiative promises to break communication barriers, increase public trust, and develop new, accessible science narratives.

This article uses Liberia’s national mental health program to explore how stakeholders make meaning of their work and how those meanings intertwine with various powers to shape program outcomes. We use interview data to analyze how the Carter Center (an INGO), Liberian government, and local mental health practitioners understood the program to address this stigmatized, often-ignored health issue. INGO officials emphasized personal connections, virtuous actions, and expertise in meaning-making, ideas intertwined with network, moral, and epistemic powers. Liberian government officials understood the program to be government directed but financially unaffordable, illustrating the government’s institutional authority but low economic power. Mental health clinicians perceived the program as a virtuous opportunity to gain expertise and economic advancement, although they used the power to exit when these aspirations were unrealized. This article illustrates that meaning-making cannot be divorced from actors’ various powers and that stakeholders’ failure to align meanings can undermine program outcomes.

A truism of modern organizational life is that organizations collaborate. They may collaborate to meet client needs, acquire resources, or gain legitimacy. They may be required to collaborate by funders, but have little direction beyond this basic mandate. In this situation, how do managers choose collaborative partners? What is important to them and when is it important? While institutional and resource-dependence theories emphasize environmental factors driving collaboration, only recently has attention has been given to factors individuals identify as important when making choices about who to collaborate with, and for what purpose. This study uses the repertory grid technique, an innovative method based on personal construct theory, to explore what is important in the minds of nonprofit managers when navigating the world of collaboration and partner selection. The results reveal that managers prioritize different traits when selecting partners depending on the type of collaboration. We conclude with a review of current collaboration theories, where the findings from this study support and deviate from them and offer five new propositions about the complex, situation-dependent nature of partner selection in the minds of nonprofit practitioners.

Legal reforms in California are reshaping archaeological education and professional training in ways that may soon warrant national attention. These changes challenge traditional pedagogical models, particularly in bachelor’s and master’s degree programs that have long served as entry points into cultural resource management (CRM) careers. Drawing on one of the most extensive surveys of CRM organizations in California, this article examines how employers are responding to this evolving landscape. The data reveal a demand for field experience, local familiarity, knowledge of relevant laws, and interpersonal skills. We contextualize these findings within broader efforts to reform training and research models in California and discuss tensions in this shifting terrain. We advocate for a new public archaeology that redefines training and professional pathways through collaboration, accountability, and a deeper commitment to the communities that archaeology serves.

Early career researchers have unique demands, many of which contribute to increased stress, decreased professional fulfillment, and burnout. Consequently, academic institutions and government organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health, are beginning to embrace structured coaching as a tool to support physician wellbeing. To date, such coaching programs have demonstrated promising results, but little is known about whether early career research faculty find coaching feasible, accessible, or helpful. To explore this question further, we developed a novel group coaching intervention for clinician researchers and scientific faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center based on the concept of appreciative inquiry, grounding the program in a positive and hopeful approach to the challenges faced by clinicians and researchers. Results from our program indicate this intervention is feasible, satisfactory, and helpful, with participants reporting enhanced self-reflection and empowerment. Effective for a wide array of research faculty, our program brought together diverse faculty, fostered connections, and encouraged future collaborations among this translational group. This suggests that our program provides a foundational blueprint that can be used by other academic medical centers who aim to develop group coaching efforts.

Current evidence underscores a need to transform how we do clinical research, shifting from academic-driven priorities to co-led community partnership focused programs, accessible and relevant career pathway programs that expand opportunities for career development, and design of trainings and practices to develop cultural competence among research teams. Failures of equitable research translation contribute to health disparities. Drivers of this failed translation include lack of diversity in both researchers and participants, lack of alignment between research institutions and the communities they serve, and lack of attention to structural sources of inequity and drivers of mistrust for science and research. The Duke University Research Equity and Diversity Initiative (READI) is a program designed to better align clinical research programs with community health priorities through community engagement. Organized around three specific aims, READI-supported programs targeting increased workforce diversity, workforce training in community engagement and cultural competence, inclusive research engagement principles, and development of trustworthy partnerships.

Rutgers Health, Clinical Research Management (CRM) program with support from New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science (NJ ACTS) provide scholarships to establish a “Clinical Research Experience” (CRE). The CRE focuses on building an entry-level Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC) workforce. The six-month precepted CRE is embedded in an accelerated master’s degree and demonstrates a skill-based approach to developing CRC resources. The CRE structure affiliated site collaboration; competency based curriculum objectives; standardized competency aligned on-boarding; and preceptor-evaluated performance. The experiential education is designed for academic medical centers (AMCs) to foster the development of qualified research coordinators. The CRE model supports “teach one, see one, do one” coupled with preceptor-evaluated feedback to cultivate clinical research competency.

Engaging, accessible, evidence-based interventions are needed to support the professional development of research mentors within the clinical and translational sciences. This article reports on the usage and impact of the University of Minnesota Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s online mentor training module, Optimizing the Practice of Mentoring (OPM). Among the 1,124 OPM users in our contemporary evaluation sample (Feb 2019–June 2022), retrospective pre-to-post gains were observed in respondents’ self-rated mentorship skills (11 items), perceptions of the overall quality of mentoring they provide, and mentoring confidence. A high proportion (83%) of users reported making or intending to make changes in their mentoring practices as a result of the training. Example behavior changes included a greater focus on aligning expectations, more proactive attention to the relationship (overall and its distinct phases), increased usage of active communication skills, adoption of tools such as Individual Development Plans, and ongoing self-reflection. Over a 10-year period, 4,011 unique individuals registered for the module, representing over 650 different institutions (a majority being affiliated with past or current Clinical and Translational Science Hubs). OPM has the versatility to be employed as a standalone, asynchronous approach for mentor development or as one curricular component of more comprehensive, multimodal programs.

New education and training opportunities are critical for the development of a diverse and highly skilled translational science workforce. In this special communication, the authors consider how Narratives of Discovery, an initiative to interview leading scientists about the sources of their creativity, can serve as a novel translational science teaching tool. Reporting on a project to map translational science principles onto nine Narratives of Discovery conducted to date, the authors demonstrate how translational science principles are manifested in the career trajectories of these scientists and propose that the narratives can serve as a formative model for trainees. Findings from systematic coding of the Narratives of Discovery suggest that the narrative format is particularly well suited to highlight translational science principles not well-addressed by existing education opportunities, including what it means for scientists to be creative and innovative, use bold and rigorous approaches, and prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Offering excerpts from the published Narratives of Discovery and quotations from the scientists themselves, the authors aim to create space for continued conversation about how to best crystallize the concepts of translational science and advance translational science education and training initiatives.