The hidden curriculum encompasses the norms, values, and behaviors within a learning environment. Navigating the hidden curricula of academia is crucial for doctoral trainees, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds. Faculty mentors have an important role in helping trainees uncover and cope with the hidden curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of the hidden curriculum among diverse doctoral trainees and mentors.

Following a presentation on the hidden curriculum at the Association for Clinical and Translational Science annual meeting in March 2021, attendees were asked to brainstorm ideas for diverse trainees and their mentors. Breakout room discussions were held for specific hidden curriculum topics; participants voted on which topics to discuss from a list of topics defined during the presentation. Ideas from these discussions were presented to the larger group to upvote.

Participants (n = 116) voted to discuss the following hidden curriculum topics: “coping with bias,” “assertive communication,” “knowing how things work,” and “developing a career.” Many suggestions emphasized the role of institutions in empowering mentors to help diverse trainees and, more generally, to meaningfully support policies and programs that facilitate the career success of trainees and faculty from underrepresented backgrounds.

This work generated a list of suggested action items for trainees, mentors, and institutions to ameliorate the hidden curricula of academia, especially for diverse trainees. However, institutions need to support changes that will facilitate these discussions as well as more broadly enable the success of faculty and students from diverse backgrounds.

The University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research hub supports multiple pilot award programs that engage cross-disciplinary Translational Teams. To support those teams, our Team Science group aims to offer a learning experience that is accessible, active, and actionable. We identified Collaboration Planning as a high-impact intervention to stimulate team-building activities that provide Translational Team members with the skills to lead and participate in high-impact teams.

We adapted the published materials on Collaboration Planning to develop a 90-minute facilitated intervention with questions in 10 areas, presuming no previous knowledge of Science of Team Science (SciTS) or team-science best practices. Attendees received a short follow-up survey and submitted a written collaboration plan with their first quarterly progress report.

Thirty-nine participants from 13 pilot teams from a wide range of disciplines engaged in these sessions. We found that teams struggled to know who to invite, that some of our questions were confusing and too grounded in the language of SciTS, and groups lacked plans for managing their information and communications. We identified several areas for improvement including ensuring that the process is flexible to meet the needs of different teams, continuing to evolve the questions so they resonate with teams, and the need to provide resources for areas where teams needed additional guidance, including information and data management, authorship policies, and conflict management.

With further development and testing, Collaboration Planning has the potential to support Translational Teams in developing strong team dynamics and team functioning.

The purpose of this scoping review is two-fold: to assess the literature that quantitatively measures outcomes of mentorship programs designed to support research-focused junior faculty and to identify mentoring strategies that promote diversity within academic medicine mentoring programs.

Studies were identified by searching Medline using MESH terms for mentoring and academic medicine. Eligibility criteria included studies focused on junior faculty in research-focused positions, receiving mentorship, in an academic medical center in the USA, with outcomes collected to measure career success (career trajectory, career satisfaction, quality of life, research productivity, leadership positions). Data were abstracted using a standardized data collection form, and best practices were summarized.

Search terms resulted in 1,842 articles for title and abstract review, with 27 manuscripts meeting inclusion criteria. Two studies focused specifically on women, and four studies focused on junior faculty from racial/ethnic backgrounds underrepresented in medicine. From the initial search, few studies were designed to specifically increase diversity or capture outcomes relevant to promotion within academic medicine. Of those which did, most studies captured the impact on research productivity and career satisfaction. Traditional one-on-one mentorship, structured peer mentorship facilitated by a senior mentor, and peer mentorship in combination with one-on-one mentorship were found to be effective strategies to facilitate research productivity.

Efforts are needed at the mentee, mentor, and institutional level to provide mentorship to diverse junior faculty on research competencies and career trajectory, create a sense of belonging, and connect junior faculty with institutional resources to support career success.

A national survey characterized training and career development for translational researchers through Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) T32/TL1 programs. This report summarizes program goals, trainee characteristics, and mentorship practices.

A web link to a voluntary survey was emailed to 51 active TL1 program directors and administrators. Descriptive analyses were performed on aggregate data. Qualitative data analysis used open coding of text followed by an axial coding strategy based on the grounded theory approach.

Fifty out of 51 (98%) invited CTSA hubs responded. Training program goals were aligned with the CTSA mission. The trainee population consisted of predoctoral students (50%), postdoctoral fellows (30%), and health professional students in short-term (11%) or year-out (9%) research training. Forty percent of TL1 programs support both predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees. Trainees are diverse by academic affiliation, mostly from medicine, engineering, public health, non-health sciences, pharmacy, and nursing. Mentor training is offered by most programs, but mandatory at less than one-third of them. Most mentoring teams consist of two or more mentors.

CTSA TL1 programs are distinct from other NIH-funded training programs in their focus on clinical and translational research, cross-disciplinary approaches, emphasis on team science, and integration of multiple trainee types. Trainees in nearly all TL1 programs were engaged in all phases of translational research (preclinical, clinical, implementation, public health), suggesting that the CTSA TL1 program is meeting the mandate of NCATS to provide training to develop the clinical and translational research workforce.

There is discontent and turnover among faculty at US academic health centers because of the challenges in balancing clinical, research, teaching, and work–life responsibilities in the current healthcare environment. One potential strategy to improve faculty satisfaction and limit turnover is through faculty mentoring programs.

A Mentor Leadership Council was formed to design and implement an institution-wide faculty mentoring program across all colleges at an academic health center. The authors conducted an experimental study of the impact of the mentoring program using pre-intervention (2011) and 6-year (2017) post-intervention faculty surveys that measured the long-term effectiveness of the program.

The percent of faculty who responded to the surveys was 45.9% (656/1428) in 2011 and 40.2% (706/1756) in 2017. For faculty below the rank of full professor, percent of faculty with a mentor (45.3% vs. 67.1%, P < 0.001), familiarity with promotion criteria (81.7% vs. 90.0%, P = 0.001), and satisfaction with department’s support of career (75.6% vs. 84.7%, P = 0.002) improved. The percent of full professors serving as mentors also increased from 50.3% in 2011 to 68.0% in 2017 (P = 0.002). However, the percent of non-retiring faculty considering leaving the institution over the next 2 years increased from 18.8% in 2011 to 24.3% in 2017 (P = 0.02).

Implementation of an institution-wide faculty mentoring program significantly improved metrics of career development and faculty satisfaction but was not associated with a reduction in the percent of faculty considering leaving the institution. This suggests the need for additional efforts to identify and limit factors driving faculty turnover.

Defining key barriers to the development of a well-trained clinical research professional (CRP) workforce is an essential first step in identifying solutions for successful CRP onboarding, training, and competency development, which will enhance quality across the clinical and translational research enterprise. This study aimed to summarize barriers and best practices at academic medical centers related to effective CRP onboarding, training, professional development, identify challenges with the assessment of and mentoring for CRP competency growth, and describe opportunities to improve training and professionalization for the CRP career pathway.

Qualitative data from a series of Un-Meeting breakout sessions and open-text survey questions were analyzed to explore the complex issues involved when developing high-quality onboarding and continuing education opportunities for CRPs at academic medical centers.

Results suggest there are several barriers to training the CRP workforce, including balancing foundational onboarding with role-based training, managing logistical challenges and institutional contexts, identifying/enlisting institutional champions, assessing competency, and providing high-quality mentorship. Several of these themes are interrelated. Two universal threads present throughout all themes are the need for effective communication and the need to improve professionalization of the CRP career pathway.

Few institutions have solved all the issues related to training a competent and adaptable CRP workforce, although some have addressed one or more. We applied a socio-technical lens to illustrate our findings and the need for NCATS-funded academic medical centers to work collaboratively within and across institutions to overcome training barriers and support a vital, well-qualified workforce and present several exemplars from the field to help attain this goal.

The patient portal may be an effective method for administering surveys regarding participant research experiences but has not been systematically studied.

We evaluated 4 methods of delivering a research participant perception survey: mailing, phone, email, and patient portal. Participants of research studies were identified (n=4013) and 800 were randomly selected to receive a survey, 200 for each method. Outcomes included response rate, survey completeness, and cost.

Among those aged <65 years, response rates did not differ between mail, phone, and patient portal (22%, 29%, 30%, p>0.07). Among these methods, the patient portal was the lowest-cost option. Response rates were significantly lower using email (10%, p<0.01), the lowest-cost option. In contrast, among those aged 65+ years, mail was superior to the electronic methods (p<0.02).

The patient portal was among the most effective ways to reach research participants, and was less expensive than surveys administered by mail or telephone.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had substantial global morbidity and mortality. Clinical research related to prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of COVID-19 is a top priority. Effective and efficient recruitment is challenging even without added constraints of a global pandemic. Recruitment registries offer a potential solution to slow or difficult recruitment.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and implementation of a digital research recruitment registry to optimize awareness and participant enrollment for COVID-19-related research in Baltimore and to report preliminary results.

Planning began in March 2020, and the registry launched in July 2020. The primary recruitment mechanisms include electronic medical record data, postcards distributed at testing sites, and digital advertising campaigns. Following consent in a Research Electronic Data Capture survey, participants answer questions related to COVID-19 exposure, testing, and willingness to participate in research. Branching logic presents participants with studies they might be eligible for.

As of March 24, 2021, 9010 participants have enrolled, and 64.2% are female, 80.6% are White, 9.4% are Black or African American, and 6% are Hispanic or Latino. Phone outreach has had the highest response rate (13.1%), followed by email (11.9%), text (11.4%), and patient portal message (9.4%). Eleven study teams have utilized the registry, and 4596 matches have been made between study teams and interested volunteers.

Effective and efficient recruitment strategies are more important now than ever due to the time-limited nature of COVID-19 research. Pilot efforts have been successful in connecting interested participants with recruiting study teams.

Clinical trial participation among US Hispanics remains low, despite a significant effort by research institutions nationwide. ResearchMatch, a national online platform, has matched 113,372 individuals interested in participating in research with studies conducted by 8778 researchers. To increase accessibility to Spanish speakers, we translated the ResearchMatch platform into Spanish by implementing tenets of health literacy and respecting linguistic and cultural diversity across the US Hispanic population. We describe this multiphase process, preliminary results, and lessons learned.

Translation of the ResearchMatch site consisted of several activities including: (1) improving the English language site’s reading level, removing jargon, and using plain language; (2) obtaining a professional Spanish translation of the site and incorporating iterative revisions by a panel of bilingual community members from diverse Hispanic backgrounds; (3) technical development and launch; and (4) initial promotion.

The Spanish language version was launched in August 2018, after 11 months of development. Community input improved the initial translation, and early registration and use by researchers demonstrate the utility of Spanish ResearchMatch in engaging Hispanics. Over 12,500 volunteers in ResearchMatch self-identify as Hispanic (8.5%). From August 2018 to March 2020, 162 volunteers registered through the Spanish language version of ResearchMatch, and over 500 new and existing volunteers have registered a preference to receive messages about studies in Spanish.

By applying the principles of health literacy and cultural competence, we developed a Spanish language translation of ResearchMatch. Our multiphase approach to translation included key principles of community engagement that should prove informative to other multilingual web-based platforms.

Little is known about what motivates people to enroll in research registries. The purpose of this study is to identify facilitators of registry enrollment among diverse older adults.

Participants completed an 18-item Research Interest Assessment Tool. We used logistic regression analyses to examine responses across participants and by race and gender.

Participants (N=374) were 58% black, 76% women, with a mean age of 68.2 years. All participants were motivated to maintain their memory while aging. Facilitators of registry enrolled varied by both race and gender. Notably, blacks (estimate=0.71, p<0.0001) and women (estimate=0.32, p=0.03) were more willing to enroll in the registry due to home visits compared with whites and men, respectively.

Researchers must consider participant desire for maintaining memory while aging and home visits when designing culturally tailored registries.

There is a dearth of literature providing guidance on how to effectively communicate about clinical research (CR).

Using the transactional model of communication, a content analysis of the investigator (n=62) and participant (n=18) Web sites of institutions funded through the National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) was conducted to identify their strategies (e.g., messages) for communicating about CR participation.

CTSAs targeted investigators with CR participation content across the main Web sites, although most CTSAs (n=55; 88.7%) also included CR participation content for participants. In total, 18 CTSAs (29%) hosted participant Web sites. Participant sites included 13 message types about CR participation (e.g., registry enrollment) and 5 additional channels (e.g., email, phone number) to communicate about CR. However, many CTSA participant Web sites excluded information explaining the CR process and offered CR content exclusively in English.

CTSAs should identify their target audience and design strategies (e.g., messages, channels) accordingly.