Who is Conducting Research at CHOP?

Children's Hospital Philadelphia has hundreds of employees who work together to advance clinical research.

They work in many different settings, including medical settings, office buildings, and the community.

Let's meet a few important people on the study team.

The principal investigator, or PI, is the person responsible for the study. The PI helps design the study and analyzes the results. They also make sure participants enrolled in their study are safe and help handle any medical issues or questions that may come up during the study.

The study coordinator helps organize the study paperwork, plans study visits, finds study participants, and communicates with families. If you volunteer for clinical research at CHOP, the study coordinator or research assistant usually will be the person to speak with you the most.

CHOP is a teaching hospital, which means that we often have trainees, including students from high schools, colleges, and medical schools, helping to run research studies. Students work to support the study team by collecting and reviewing data, planning the study day, and assisting study participant visits.

Community health workers are sometimes part of a research team too. These study team members provide hands on support in the community and are often representative of the neighborhood they work in. Community health workers are experts in education. They may offer support in the home for families participating in research or help families navigate complicated health and social services systems.

CHOP also has a research clinic located on its main campus, the Center for Human Phenomic Science.

The word “phenomic” means the study of how the environment and a person's lifestyle interact with their genetics to influence health outcomes and risk of disease.

The nurses, nurse practitioners, and medical assistants at the Center for Human Phenomic Science help by collecting samples, performing EKGs and vital signs, completing physical assessments, and making sure all research participants are safe during their study visit.

Let's hear from a few study team members on what their research projects are and why they chose to do research at CHOP.

Marné Castillo, PhD, MEd

My name is Marné Castillo.

 Jeffrey S. Gerber, MD, PhD

My name is Jeff Gerber.

 Ahtish Arputhan

My name is Ahtish Arputhan.

 Nola E. Juste, MPH, CCRP

My name is Nola Juste.

 Delitza Hernandez-Diaz

My name is Delizta. What I enjoy most about research is working with the community. I really like that interaction, getting the community on board, finding new ways to help, and collaborating.

My experience with the community, it's sometimes when we're talking about research, they're not really sure of how they can help. And when they learn about what we're doing here, they feel like, oh wow, this is something I can do. So that's like, to me, the best feeling.

 Arputhan
In medical care, especially with when we work with families and kids, we try very hard to remove burden for families, and I see clinical research being a huge factor in contributing to that removal of burden because in clinical research, we test safety, the effectiveness, and the feasibility of all the interventions we do in clinical practice. So by that extension, clinical research is so important. So we know how best we can help families.

Juste
We don't rest on our laurels here at CHOP, even though we're an incredibly high ranked institution. I feel like we're always striving to improve. So we're always looking at what can we do better? How can we strive for excellence better, and how can we embody that? And not only do we have state-of-the-art research facilities, but I think we have state-of-the-art ideas, and we're looking to answer great scientific questions, really just to improve the lives of patients, not just in Philadelphia, not just in Pennsylvania, but around the world.

I think that is what makes our research so exciting is because the patient voice is included. It's not just us as scientists sitting in a room coming up with ideas, but we're really looking to get that patient voice and to make sure that the research resonates with the community and will benefit very broadly and disseminating the research and sharing the knowledge that we learn. We want to make sure that the patients are informed about the research. And so starting there, we always are very thoughtful and try to make sure that we're using common terms language when we're approaching a parent or a patient about the research. We want to be absolutely transparent about what the research involves, what are the risks, what are the benefits. And the only reason we do research is to improve care for kids.

And so we are always doing it because we think it will help the kid, and if it cannot help that child directly, we know that the hope is to help future children and future generations and to really broaden our knowledge so that, you know, the work that we're doing today, the clinical medicine that we're practicing today can get even better and more precise in the future.

Dr. Gerber

So clinical research is important because it may be surprising to people, but many of the treatments and, and procedures that we do in clinical medicine and certainly in Pediatrics, many are evidence-based, but we still need a lot of evidence to answer those questions. And so if we don't do the research, we're still going to have some uncertainty about what is the best medication, what might be the best procedure.

Clinical research allows us to apply scientific methods to find out what is the most effective and the safest treatment for kids and moving forward, and that's just so beneficial to kids and their families.

 Dr. Castillo

Being able to do the work that we do and being able to conduct the type of research that I really, really enjoy is to be able to ask those questions, go into the community, let them know what we're doing at CHOP, but also to ask them how we might be able to do it better. For us, it helps to keep us really honest, and so I would like to encourage folks to really think about participating in research because they can, and to be truthful and to come and bring their truth and to bring their voice to us because it's the only way that CHOP can improve and get better. And I think that we have been getting better at doing that at, listening to community and to patient voices. In the years that I've been here, I see that it's only gotten better.

Narrator

If you choose to participate in clinical research, CHOP study teams work together to make sure caregivers and children have a safe, a well informed and efficient experience. We're grateful for your interest in supporting clinical research at CHOP.