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Oby Ukadike: From the campus of Harvard Medical School, this is ThinkResearch, a podcast devoted to the stories behind clinical research. I'm Oby.

Brendan Keegan: And I'm Brendan. And we are your hosts. ThinkResearch is brought to you by Harvard Catalyst, Harvard University's Clinical and Translational Science Center.

Oby Ukadike: And by NCATS, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Brendan Keegan: In 2013 In 2013 UK Chief Scientist Sir Mark Walport declared that "Science is not finished until it's communicated." At Harvard Catalyst, Communications is central to the mission of advancing clinical and translational research. Using social media, email marketing, journalism, analytics, evidence-based practices in communications strategy and more, the Harvard Catalyst Communications team does this vital work. Today, Hardeep Ranu, Translational Innovator project manager at Harvard Catalyst and guest host, is joined by our Harvard Catalyst Communications team, Leslie Lawler, communication specialist, Angela Rakauskas, communications manager, and Lori Shridhare, communications director. They discuss the science of communication and what it takes to clearly communicate the work of all of Harvard Catalyst's programs and initiatives, plus the work across Harvard and 19 academic healthcare centers, with thousands of researchers across disciplines and the general public.

Hardeep Ranu: Hello. My name is Hardeep Ranu. Today I have a wonderful group of people joining me for this special podcast, and it is the Harvard Catalyst communications team. And we're going to talk a little bit about what they do in terms of communications for Harvard Catalyst as a whole, and also get into a little bit about how they work with us at Translational Innovator and how we work with them as well. So I'm going to allow Lori Shridare, the director of communications, to introduce herself, and the other members of our team.

Lori Shridare: Thanks, Hardeep. So great to be here and sitting with our, as you said, wonderful team, Leslie Lawler, who is our communication specialist, and Angela Rakauskas, who is our communications manager. And so we've been a team working as part of communications and leading these efforts since 2012, when I joined, and really we support a very unique mission in that--

As most of the listeners would know, Harvard Catalyst is charged with translating biomedical discoveries to human health. And that is a very unique space, so we specifically partner with Harvard Medical School's Office of Communications and really work on best practices for science communications to our community, which is basically all of the Harvard affiliated faculty investigators and there are thousands of those.

And then we also have a mandate over time to communicate with the public and really share best practices and interesting stories, news articles, interviews with our investigators. So that kind of is a brief overview of what we do.

Hardeep Ranu: Can you sort of expand upon what your role is in clinical research, and also who your audience is as well?

Lori Shridare: Yeah, that's a great question. So when you talk about clinical research, in our case, we are actually training, really, the next generation of the workforce in various ways. So we're offering tools, which are informatics tools, data discovery tools. We are offering, of course, pilot funding, which is a primary job of Translational Innovator. Education, lots of consulting services on setting up studies.

So we are really, in a sense, a one stop shop for many resources and opportunities, and many of the investigators actually don't know necessarily they have this access, right? So our audience could be a very transitional group of trainees. They're rotating in and out every few years of our 19 academic health care institutions, i.e. the hospitals, and smaller ones, which is why we call them centers, academic health care centers.

So when we are working with this group, we're looking at actually pinpointing the right stage for where they might need services, education, courses training. So that's part of getting them actually interested in and supported for a career in clinical research. As you know, it's extremely competitive and also a very challenging environment to succeed in with all of the funding restrictions.

Many of our listeners might know we're funded by the NIH, and of course, that varies in terms of grant opportunities for the junior researchers, themselves. So we point them to those opportunities that they may actually miss. Many of the health care organizations they work for have resources like ours, but we are supporting all of them across Harvard.

So when the NIH founded our agency, which was in the mid-2000s, the agency that funds us, it was specifically to be that bridge between academia and the hospitals that they serve. And so for smaller clinical and translational science centers around the country, of which there are about 60, that might just be a one-to-one, one a small university with one small hospital. We, of course, are very big environment with, again, 19.

So our role is really to, again, find the precise resources and courses that could meet their needs, and we send them this information directly through email marketing with strategic data on the list that we pinpoint for where they are. We use our networking software called profiles for that often.

We have a very diverse and expanded social media platform-- or, I should say platforms-- that Leslie will talk about a bit. We have a big marketing arm through Angela, as well, [? who's ?] a lot of outreach through our newsletter and other channels.

Hardeep Ranu: OK, great. So you've mentioned Leslie and Angela, so why don't we bring them in here and hear what they have to say? Angela, why don't you introduce yourself and talk a bit about what your role is.

Angela Rakauskas: Thanks, Hardeep. I'm Angela Rakauskas. I'm the marketing communications manager for Harvard Catalyst, and a lot of what I do is work with the programs to help them with their needs with marketing plans to promote whatever it is they need to promote.

So, for example, with pilot funding with Translational Innovator, we talk about what are we promoting? What is the latest pilot funding? Who are the people we need to get in touch with as our target audience? And we usually are able to use profiles to create a list and put that into our email marketing system and send off an email to those specific people, because having a target list will help us really get the people the information of the people we want to know about whatever we're promoting.

Hardeep Ranu: Great. Leslie, what about you? You do Instagram, social media stuff. Why don't you talk a bit about social media and your role in the team as well?

Leslie Lawler: Definitely. So I'm Leslie Lawler. I'm communications specialist for Harvard Catalyst. I've been with Harvard Catalyst for about 3 and 1/2 years now, and I really support the communications team with strategy and outreach. I help with email marketing. Specifically, I handle our biweekly newsletter. I'm in charge of social media, as you said. I also help with some things on the website. I'm in charge of the website calendar, the news section, and help review new content for the website and build pages, too.

So focusing on social media, we really use social media to promote our programs opportunities-- so like pilot funding with Translational Innovator-- resources, courses, our news articles. We also use social media for advertising sometimes. So our postgraduate education program has dozens of clinical and translational science courses, biomedical research courses.

And those are offered free to the Harvard community, as with our other resources, but it's also offered many of the courses for a fee to all MDs, researchers, scientists really across the globe. So you don't have to be affiliated with Harvard to apply. And so we'll use advertising to reach that broader audience. So we've done Twitter ads, Instagram ads, Facebook and Google ads, too.

But talking about platforms, as you said, we're on Instagram. We're also on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Twitter is a really important platform for us. Many researchers are on Twitter and they're active on there. We see a lot of engagement on Twitter. And when I say engagement, I mean likes, retweets, people tagging us, people clicking through on our links in our posts, so actually going where we want them to go to the information.

everything we do is really strategic. And, again, we're looking at trends in social media. We're looking at other science centers. What are they doing? What is Harvard Medical School doing?

And then something else really important that we do is we look at the data. So we regularly look at the analytics for all of our platforms, and then we discuss in our team meetings like what posts are getting good engagement. And it helps us to really plan our content going forward.

Hardeep Ranu: So just kind of thinking through what you've all been saying, and knowing what communications as a whole is or are, where-- and I'm just going to throw this out to anyone who wants to answer this question-- well, I have two questions, actually, related to it. One is like, where do you think the communications is going, in terms of platforms that people are going to use, the way in which people interact?

And I guess the second one is also something of an interest of mine in terms of written communications on the website and having the science that's out there, the really great science that our researchers do, and making it more friendly to those people who don't have a scientific background. You know, I'm going to throw it out there. Lori, if you wanted to start.

Lori Shridare: Yeah, sure. It's a great couple of questions. And my answer actually ties in sort of to both in that even with any developments or changes that we follow, the trends, and say a new social media site that's promising-- or we didn't mention YouTube, but of course videos are very important for us as well, and that is a social media platform in itself.

What we really stand by is that, first and foremost, science communications need to be lay-friendly, even when we're communicating with a scientific audience. So both, where we have both audiences is always in mind.

As you very much know, when you're reading as an expert in one area, say microbiology, you won't necessarily understand what's a very jargon-filled manuscript in neurology. So what we do as a rule is we follow the best practices for science communications, which is to move entirely away from jargon so they were always lay-friendly, even when we published, as when scientists publish, we want to make sure that our papers are reaching the public and they are understandable, right, as best as possible. There are times when it can't be, but what we do is we are in the role of translation and the summarizing and finding very succinct ways to declutter all of the information, and unfortunately, of course, as many of us know, misinformation that's out there.

So that's where we also feel that our role is, at least influencing the public health discourse in that way. We do have some of our programs that work directly in that space as well. And diversity inclusion and in public health, community engagement. So we are always looking to be clear.

But I think, in terms of technology, as both Leslie and Angela were talking about, we're looking at always what our audiences are looking to use and what they'll respond to. So if they are very short in time, which of course, many scientists and MDs are, different platforms and apps that can speak to quicker, more inclusive information that they don't have to spend lots of time weeding through.

And that's another reason why our goal on the website is to always keep our information very, very brief and graphics-led as well as, of course, in social media. Social media as a graphics platform first and foremost. Twitter has very short character counts. That is all for a reason. We're competing in a very information-heavy environment. So I think the combination of what you asked, both the technology and the approach to lay-friendly communications would be the guiding principles in our strategy going forward.

Leslie Lawler: I would just say that technology and social media is always changing and evolving and, like Lori said, a lot of people don't have a lot of time. So I think it's going to be interesting to see what does happen and adapt to that and change our strategy based on the different platforms that pop up and where our audience goes.

Hardeep Ranu: Yeah. Angela, what, about you? You do the email. You're the email queen.

Angela Rakauskas: I do.

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Hardeep Ranu: I know that it's difficult to get people engaged in email. You know, when you're scrolling through your email, do I want to look at this or that?

Angela Rakauskas: Exactly. But study after study that comes out is email is still the most popular and the best way to engage people. They actually do open. We have a great fantastic open rate. In our newsletter recently, Leslie was working on A/B testing. And we found out if we send the email at 8:00 PM at night, we get a higher click rate. We get a higher open rate versus 4:00 PM.

And so it's a matter of testing what we're doing to see what will work and what can work better because, thinking about your email list, is we own that list and we can always send to it. Versus social media, Instagram can go out. Twitter can go out. So you might not be able to get the information out that way that you want to, and you don't own the list of people who follow you, so you have no way of contacting them. So in case, besides Twitter or Instagram going out for a day, like if your account is suspended.

So it's also thinking about each of the different ways we use our channels and figuring out, what are the possibilities of saying something going wrong and having a backup plan?

Hardeep Ranu: Right. Right. So I want to move on to Translational Innovative, because that's my program. And I know, like I've said, that I've worked with you guys so quite a bit. And I always find it so interesting working with you guys. It's always so fun.

And I think you touched on it, Lori, in terms of the outreach. And do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because you have the series, the Five Questions Series, and the news articles and stuff. And a lot of times that's post-award. So we've talked about pre-award. How do we get the people to come and apply? But there's also the important post-award part.

Lori Shridare: Yeah. So for Translational Innovators, as you're saying specifically, which when we work with you on pilot funding, we, yes, of course, announce the awardees and we go into depth in the articles a bit on the projects, themselves. They're usually one-year pilot funding projects. So they're early seed funding.

And so we really get into the research background of the investigator, their question that they're asking, any success already in that field. It could be really interesting, anything from autism to new interventions for neurosurgery, right? We have all kinds of interdisciplinary projects. So we like to do this Five Questions Series, which is another brief way for short attention spans to read an interview with an investigator.

And so those are sort of freshly minted opportunities that come our way. And people are very much interested in usually being interviewed. And the other thing we do post [? a ?] [? word ?] sometimes is, we need to take the big picture on what's happening with Translational Innovator-- I think in the past we've done a couple of larger news articles for HMS news, which is something that's always a possibility.

Also looking into the future, so for example, if an awardee happens to secure very large funding down the line, we'll trace back their success to their early pilot funding, and then we'll do a bigger story that's more of an article showing, again, the importance of this early support. And also, as you know, your program does more than just pilot funding. You support them through many stages. So that grooming and that preparation and that development is something we like to capture in these news stories when we have a chance to do sort of the larger features.

Hardeep Ranu: Yeah, I think, like you said, that's what is unique about our program. We give them an award, but it's a post-award. It's a year-long process of support, which we really hope will drive the success of the project.

And also I've heard back from, like I mentioned, Victor Neal, but there have been other investigators who have really liked the Five Questions and the podcasts and stuff and the articles that have come out because they can then show their department chairs or their other colleagues. Like here's the funding I got and the news about it. And you know, it raises a profile of the investigators, as well, which I think is really important.

So one of the things I thought was interesting-- and I know that you guys have been involved in small projects that we've been a part of that-- we being Translational Innovator-- have collaborated with the Lab for Innovation Science at Harvard, LISH. They're part of the business school. And we've definitely done sort of A/B testing of email subject lines to see if people open the emails or encourage people to apply or certain incentives and things.

But I thought that's interesting in terms of Translational Innovator and our work, also, on the sort of science of science. But also, it's something that you're using as well. You're gathering your own sets of data to analyze to see who's going to open what when, like you said, and also, the different Instagram stories or posts, you know, which ones get more likes and that kind of thing. So I think it would be good to hear from, Leslie and Angela, both of you on in terms of that.

Lori Shridare: Yeah, definitely. I mean, as we talked about earlier, we've done A/B testing for time that we sent out the newsletter, which has been really helpful. But we also use it weekly or biweekly with our newsletter for subject line.

So for every newsletter, we'll have two different subject lines. Sometimes it could be like a title of one of the news articles in the newsletter, or a lot of times it'll be two different things. Like if we have a bio statistic short course coming up, it could be "Bio Statistic Short Course." And if we have a new course-- there's a new one, Essentials of CT Research that we have-- it could be "An Essentials of CT Research."

So we'll send that out. It goes to half. So half the audience of our newsletter gets one subject line. The other half gets the other. And we can then compare if certain subject lines, more people are opening the newsletter. And then we can also see over time, are there certain subjects that people are responding more to and opening more. For example, we found when we mentioned bio stats, that's always a really popular topic and we do get higher click rates if we mention bio stats.

So that's within the newsletter. And then also with social media, as I said earlier, data's super important. So looking at the analytics through different platforms and also Google Analytics to see what people are responding to, what people are clicking on and engaging with.

I think a good example of this would be video for social media. So that's such a trend in social media is video. And a lot of studies have shown people are more likely to engage with content if there's video. So over the last, I would say two years, we've really tried to incorporate more video into our posts, and we've definitely seen our engagement increase across all platforms.

I think a good example is our summer internship program. It's our visiting Research Internship Program, or RIP, as we call it. We have first and second year medical students from around the US from diverse backgrounds come to Harvard, or we've done it virtually the last few years, but they intern in a Harvard lab for the summer and they do a research project.

And what we've done in the last few years with them is we've done videos of the interns answering five questions, things about what they're studying, what their research project is, who their mentor is, their experience with the program, and that's done really, really well for us. People have really engaged with that and shared it. And it's been a great way to also just promote that program, too.

Hardeep Ranu: So one of the things, also, if we just get back to the science and the research that-- I'm really speaking as a scientist, myself-- and knowing the scientific process.

And one of the things that I know is that science, it's never really about-- you don't make the-- forgive this analogy, but the Eureka moment. You know, that rarely happens, but also these incremental steps just as important. And I was wondering if you want to just talk about that side of things as well. Communicating those is incredibly important, as well.

Lori Shridare: Yeah, that's a beautiful question. And I think that the research process as a whole is really the unsung hero of science, right? So it's not as sexy to talk about interoperability, what goes on behind the scenes in a lab in a hospital, in the research infrastructure itself, what it takes to get a discovery, as we say, from bench to bedside. That itself doesn't sound very exciting, but when you get into, as you were saying, this iterative process of really the foundational steps that really empower and sustain the future of our research workforce, and that means human health solutions for all of us.

Without that, we don't have the interventions. We don't have the therapeutics. We don't have the medicines, right? We don't have all of the discoveries that are absolutely critical. So I do believe-- and maybe I'm biased from being in this work for so long now-- that there are really these incredible stories.

And the other part of being an unsung hero is that, as you said, there may be the flash stories and the headlines of the groundbreaking news and the research and the Eureka moments, but every day there are steps that are done by scientists all around the world that never make it to the headlines, that never win the awards, but their basic steps-- and not just basic, sometimes very complicated steps and discoveries-- are what make the Eureka moments happen later.

So we are very much in support of that. That's why we take great pains to really cover the stories, hear from the researchers themselves, and learn these fascinating stories as we do through this podcast because there are some amazing mini-Eureka moments that, again, may not be the final step because, as you know, scientific research a very long process, takes years, it takes lots of patience, takes lots of funding, and it is a very exciting process because every turn has new discoveries.

But behind that are lots of generally typical obstacles and hurdles. So again, that may not be the sexy part or the interesting part, but we really love finding the gems in that and appreciating all the hard work that scientists, physician scientists, and others do, and the study teams that support them.

Hardeep Ranu: Yeah. Great, great. I think that's a really important thing to put out there for people to hear.

And I think I would also be remiss in not addressing how COVID affected your communications. I mean, I don't necessarily mean in terms of working from home-- although you can also address that if you want to-- but also in terms of having to sort of pivot, as it were, to communications related to that. And that was changing all the time. It still is, really. Now it would be two years ago. We're in the end of March right now.

Lori Shridare: Yeah. There was certainly a transition for us, as well as disruption in the services and the research, of course. Many of the clinical trials had to be put on hold. There was a lot of back end efforts to really support whatever. Even our organizations, the hospitals pivoted to more COVID research and moved away from what they were doing. So there was an interruption.

On our end, we actually benefited from having several years of remote offerings, you know, of course, through education, webinars, courses. We, like others, transitioned entirely to that. But we also found a way to come together and bring all the hospitals and the academic health care centers information on COVID resources, and we put them all into an ongoing iterative list on our site that Leslie manages, mostly. And we have that prominently featured because that is important right now. And for especially the first year, that was what investigators needed pretty quickly how to navigate through all of the changes.

So I think that, overall, it's been challenging on the ground. Remotely and virtually, it's been a good opportunity to open up more of our Zoom meetings. Our symposia now are on Zoom, and they will change back to in-person eventually.

And the other thing is, as we mentioned before with profiles, it's been an opportunity to open up some work there where we have a specific platform called COVID Authors that Harvard Catalyst Profile supports. And it's basically access to all the publications around the world on COVID research, which is an essential offering, I think.

So yeah, it's a very unfortunate change for the biomedical community and a lot of stress, of course, on all of our physicians and scientists. But as far as our work in communications, it's been a great support to use the advanced networks that we already have and that others already have so we can communicate virtually.

Hardeep Ranu: Right. It's all really important stuff to really consider. But being a resource for anything related to COVID is a really great thing. And I certainly didn't know about that, so it's good to hear about that.

So I want to thank you guys for taking the time to talk to me about all the important work that you do. So thank you.

Leslie Lawler: Thank you, Hardeep.

Angela Rakauskas: Thank you for having us on.

Brendan Keegan: Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on iTunes and help us spread the word about the amazing research taking place across the Harvard community.

Oby Ukadike: To learn more about the guests on this episode, visit our website, catalyst.harvard.edu/thinkresearch.