Engagement in Research 101: Introduction to Engaging Patient & Community Partners in Research

Are you interested in learning about patient and community engagement and how it can benefit your research? Excited by the idea of engaging patient, community, or other partners in your research, but unsure about where to start? Want to know more about how to engage partners at different points throughout your study?

Engaging with patient and community partners who are impacted by your research can be instrumental to the success of your study. This online training will provide an overview of engagement in research, highlighting that engagement is not "all or nothing" or "one-size-fits-all", but instead encompasses a wide variety of low touch to high touch approaches that could be right for your study.

The session will cover common myths/misconceptions about engagement in research, benefits of and key considerations for engaging patient and community partners in research, and initial steps/existing resources you can leverage to begin engaging partners in your research.

Presenters:
Alicia Bilheimer, MPH - Director of Engaged Science, NC TraCS
Veronica Carlisle, MPH, CHES - Senior Community Health Educator, UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC)
Nisha Datta, MS - Senior Project Manager, NC TraCS
Simone Frank, MPH - Senior Project Manager, NC TraCS
Jennifer Potter, MPH, CHES - Senior Program Coordinator for Clinical Outreach, LCCC

Register

Engaging Patient, Community, and Other Partners in Your Research is a multi-part online training series. You may register for the entire series OR any single training session. This training series was developed collaboratively with patient, community, and researcher partners and is co-sponsored by the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and NC TraCS Institute.

This course will be split over 2 days (4/8/26 and 4/10/26) and is offered via Zoom. Attendance is required as the course will not be recorded.

Research relies on increasingly complex code. However, most academics have not received formal training in software development. This course will introduce participants to some of the best practices of professional software development. Participants will learn to structure their Python code into reusable functions and store those functions as separate scripts and/or packages. Participants will learn to write automated tests for their functions, to help confirm that results are as expected and to ensure that future changes to code do not cause unexpected changes to results.

We will also discuss how to create reproducible “environments” that record package versions in use to help avoid package version incompatibilities and ensure that results can be replicated even months or years after the original analysis.

Modular design is best paired with a version control system. We will discuss how modular design practices integrate with Git and Github, and how to set up “continuous integration” so that automated tests are run each time code is changed.

The course will primarily consist of a hands-on exercise to restructure a single long analysis file into functions and automated tests.

Register