Engagement in Research Nuts & Bolts: Specific Approaches for Engaging Patient & Community Partners in Research

There is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to engaging patient, community, or other partners in your research. Rather, there are a variety of engagement methods to suit your study's needs, your research team's capacity, and your partners' interests.

This online training will describe three common approaches for working with patient, community, and other partners in your research: 1) consultative community feedback sessions; 2) advisory boards; and 3) sustained collaboration with partners as members of the research team.

The session will cover considerations for choosing these specific engagement methods, as well as concrete processes and steps for implementing each approach. Participation in our Engagement in Research 101 training is not required to attend this session; however, some knowledge of engagement, whether from prior training(s) or personal experience, may foster deeper understanding of the material in this session.

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

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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.

Department of Health Sciences: 2026 Research Excellence Awardees

Please join the Department of Health Sciences Office of Research & Scholarship for their April research forum featuring three PhD students discussing their research.

The hybrid forum will take place in person (MacNider 321, LUNCH provided) and via Zoom. Please register to attend.

Questions? Contact the Department of Health Sciences Office of Research & Scholarship at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Addressing Statistical Challenges in Long COVID Research: Auxiliary Variable-Dependent Sampling Designs and Clustering of Complex Data Types

Long COVID is a chronic condition following acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and is characterized by a variety of persistent and potentially disabling symptoms. In this talk, we will take a deep dive into how various statistical challenges have been addressed in the analysis of adult and pediatric data from the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative.

First, we will discuss the study’s resource-efficient design in which certain assessments are only performed in a subset of individuals, with sampling based on values of auxiliary variables. This sampling occurs repeatedly over multiple visits until an individual is selected, yielding a sample drawn with complex time-varying selection probabilities dependent on auxiliary variable trajectories, and temporal dependence between the timing of sampling and timing of outcome measurement.

Second, we will discuss cross-sectional and longitudinal clustering of complex data types, including social determinants of health and repeated measurements of self-reported symptom data. These approaches include novel Bernoulli mixture modeling and latent Markov models with sparse negative-unlabeled data for characterizing Long COVID progression.

Speaker:
Harrison Reeder, PhD
Instructor in Investigation, Massachusetts General Hospital Biostatistics
Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School

This event is being cross-promoted by the NC BERD Consortium, a collaboration of the CTSA-funded BERD cores at UNC-Chapel Hill, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and Duke University School of Medicine.