A Culture of Research
Green isn’t just a researcher. He is a center of gravity, attracting PhD students and post-docs and giving them a thorough education in both science and research.
“It’s about creating a culture of research where our students learn about the scientific method,” Green says. “They have to know how to identify an important problem where there’s a real social need. They learn about collaboration. We train them very rigorously in writing grants. They learn to be persistent in applying for grants, and they learn about what reviewers are looking for. When their grants get rejected, I open my file drawer and show them my rejections.”
The goal: to train students to be independent, successful researchers who can compete nationally for grants from the National Institutes for Health.
It’s a goal that’s being achieved. After graduating, many of the PhD students have gone on to work at universities across the country. And, closer to home, four of Green’s PhD students and post-docs have become IHP faculty members conducting their own research:
- Dr. Karen Chenausky is director of the Speech in Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders (SPAN) Lab, which studies why some children with autism don’t talk.
- Dr. Kathryn Connaghan is the director of the Speech and Social Interaction Lab. She studies how speech disorders caused by neurological diseases like ALS affect people's day-to-day communication, social interactions, and overall social connectedness.
- Dr. Bridget Perry is the interim chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, program director of the clinical Doctorate in Speech-Language Pathology program, and director of the Swallowing & Communication Collaborative, which is focused on optimizing the management of swallowing and speech impairments for adults living with serious illness.
- Dr. Marziye Eshghi leads the Speech, Physiology, and Neurobiology of Aging and Dementia (SPaN-AD) lab. The lab's primary goal is to identify and validate behavioral measures, specifically focusing on speech motor control, for detecting, monitoring progression, and evaluating clinical trials related to various neurodegenerative diseases associated with dementia.
“The IHP provides an environment conducive to personal and professional growth,” Eshghi says. “It offers ample resources and grants access to hospitals and research facilities across Boston, enabling collaborative efforts with other scholars in AD research that ultimately can lead to innovative and cutting-edge advancements in the field.”
The IHP also has given Eshghi an opportunity to lead—and train the next generation of researchers. “As a mentor, I prioritize creating a welcoming environment in the lab where students from the IHP as well as other area colleges not only learn but also collaborate and find fulfillment,” she says.
Eshghi says the clinical aspects of their research in the lab, intertwined with neurobiology, neuropathology, and cognitive neuroscience, attracts students from diverse backgrounds to the SPAN-AD lab. “This diversity enriches the lab's dynamic, fostering a blend of perspectives and approaches that contribute to innovative discoveries,” she says, noting the importance of this interdisciplinary collaboration in tackling complex scientific challenges and pushing the boundaries of knowledge. “It allows us to push boundaries, unraveling the complexities of the mind and paving the way for groundbreaking discoveries.”
Growing a Lab
When Dr. Yael Arbel first arrived at the IHP, she was teaching classes and supervising speech-language pathology students in the school’s Julie Atrwood Speech, Language & Literacy Center. Then, with a seed funding award from the school’s Faculty Research Fellowship in 2o14, she bought the equipment to support her research. At first, Arbel set up the equipment in her office. Then, she moved to the Center for Health & Rehabilitation Research. And now she and her research team are transitioning to the new lab space.
In 2015, Arbel and two other faculty in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders— Dr. Sofia Vallila Rohrer and Dr. Lauryn Zipse—created, and now co-direct, the Cognitive Neuroscience Group.
“The CNG is an incubator for ideas, one that accommodates a range of research interests,” says Arbel. “I’m interested in developmental language disorders, and Sofia and Lauryn are interested in the rehabilitation of communication skills after a stroke. We do have some common themes in our interests, so we regularly share ideas and knowledge that helps our individual research.”
Arbel’s focus is on understanding the cognitive mechanisms that contribute to learning difficulties for children with developmental language disorder (DLD).
“We’re trying to understand how to best support their learning and how to use feedback to facilitate their performance,” she says. “We are asking whether the feedback clinicians regularly provide during intervention is beneficial. Our goal is to use the growing knowledge on the cognitive profiles of children with DLD to optimize treatment programs for them.”
Arbel has been awarded $5 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Speech-Language Hearing Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. She credits the IHP and her department for understanding and meeting the needs of faculty who wish to pursue research.
“I used to have a full teaching schedule and conduct research in my spare time, but the IHP recognized that I needed time and resources to engage in impactful research,” says Arbel, who recently was named the new director of the PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences program. “This support was critical for my development as a researcher.”
Making an Impact
A decade of research growth at the IHP has had a positive impact within the Massachusetts General Brigham system and beyond it.
One area of impact is the growth of institutional partnerships. The IHP is an affiliate of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Mongan Institute, which brings together 12 research centers spanning data science to healthcare delivery science, focused on achieving health equity and “improving the lives of people with complex health needs through research and training in population and health care delivery team science.”
“We see ourselves and the IHP sharing mutually beneficial opportunities,” says Stephen Bartels, MD, MS, director of the Mongan Institute. Dr. Kathleen Lyons, an IHP occupational therapy professor and director of the Cancer Rehabilitation (CaRe) Lab, is an affiliate faculty member at Mongan and an affiliate member of Mongan’s Cancer Outcomes Research and Education (CORE) program. In 2023, she co-led one of the seminars on implementation science that Dr. Bartels developed.
“Mongan and the IHP are pursuing a common goal: How do we improve care through translational team science, not just from bench to bedside but also to clinic, to community, and to population?” Bartels says. He sees an opportunity to expand the Mongan Institute’s work with the IHP and capitalize on a key lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic: Research and implementation can happen much more quickly than it commonly does.
“It takes about seven years for only about 13% of research to be used in real practice. That’s an alarming metric,” Bartels notes. “Healthcare leaders don’t want to wait five years to make major decisions on how to improve health and health care. We need to be more agile, more relevant, and more capable of quickly delivering research findings that mean something to providers who are making decisions. Together, we need to embrace the many opportunities for advancing health equity by leveraging research and training in data science, population health, and health care delivery science.”
Another area of impact are the many articles that Institute researchers publish, the conferences they attend, and the community work they do. Hogan stands out in all these areas. She shares research through multiple outlets, including her work in schools; more than 100 research papers; the SeeHearSpeak podcast; the DLD and Me website (DLD is an acronym for Developmental Language Disorder); an annual conference she convenes on implementation science; television and radio appearances; and interviews in newspapers and news sites including the Boston Globe, EducationWeek, and Axios.
Hogan has been a public voice on the challenges of reading instruction, recently explaining to the Globe that even districts such as the Boston Public Schools, which use current brain science to teach reading, will face an uphill battle because successfully teaching reading also requires addressing teachers’ unconscious biases and helping students with nonacademic barriers like homelessness and hunger. IHP faculty are also helping to define and shape the future of research. Green, for one, expects to see artificial intelligence play a more prominent role, prompting the need for “new models of collaboration with engineers and data scientists.”
“As the content experts, we’ll have to educate AI about what we know about things like stroke recovery or assessing if a drug is improving function,” he says, referencing the Project Relate work he’s done with Google. “We do our work of recording people as they speak, generating a lot of data, and then we let AI do what it’s designed to do, which is process large amounts of data. The joint effort is important because without clinical expertise it’s just a lot of information.”
Ultimately, what Green would like to see are innovations embedded in common objects and activities, such as an AI-enhanced cell phone that can detect changes in speech that might indicate a speaker’s speech has slowed due to a stroke or other brain-related illness.
Moving Forward
Thanks to the new research space, faculty and students can do increasingly collaborative research, form new partnerships, and help more clients. They also have greater opportunity to reach out to foundations that are interested in financially supporting their work.
It’s fundraising work that President Paula Milone-Nuzzo has continued to foster, forming a partnership with the national accounting firm RSM to help residents of Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood. RSM has provided more than $1.1 million in grants to help researchers test and implement clinical interventions that can improve the lives of children attending the Harvard-Kent Elementary School and the Warren-Prescott School in Charlestown and to provide speech-language and occupational therapy services to children at the neighborhood’s John F. Kennedy Center.
As Stratford notes, the new research facility is about the synergy—how research, philanthropy, companies, schools, and the public can all join forces to conduct, invest in, and participate in research that improves everyone’s lives and well-being.
“It’s the faculty and everyone else who are committed to making research at the Institute continue to grow and make a difference,” he says. “That’s the real outcome.”
The original version of this story was published in the Winter/Spring edition of MGH Institute of Health Professions Magazine.
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