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In this episode, you will hear Dr. Fernando Bruno from Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York speaking about experiences with faculty fellowships, both at the university level and the national level. He also talks about the open education resources available for faculty and his experiences with the prestigious AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship.
The Faculty Chronicles (TFC) podcast, sponsored by the Touro Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), is about building community, connection, and conversation. It will bring to life the stories behind the great works of Touro faculty, across disciplines in all our schools, focusing on classroom innovation in teaching and learning, science, business, medicine, education, wellness and more.
00:00:00:01 - 00:00:41:15
Speaker 1
Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Family Chronicles podcast. I'm Elizabeth Mooney, Chair. I'm Associate Professor in the Department of Social, Behavioral and Administrative Sciences at the College of Pharmacy in New York. Today, our guest is Fernando Goodall, Adjunct Associate Professor with the Department of Anatomy and General on Medical Campus. Dr. Bruno received his medical degree and general practitioner certification from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and his clinical experiences in the US, Brazil and Canada, including as a chief medical officer in the Palestinian Army.
00:00:42:02 - 00:01:27:17
Speaker 1
He also holds a master of public health with a focus on epidemiology from Harvard University. He was also a post-doc research fellow, leading independent research on neuropathology and tropical medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine with a focus on cerebral malaria not the brain a joint or university in 2015 and his academic efforts but acknowledged by his students and peers reading to honor the city's Junior College of Osteopathic Medicine, Teacher of the Year Award, the Turner College and University System Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the title of Open Educational Resources Pool e r ambassador for his involvement in projects that promoted equity in higher education.
00:01:28:22 - 00:02:18:02
Speaker 1
Additionally, he received an open education resume fellowship, full year fellowship from Torrey University. What is what led to the creation of free scientific education materials that promote equity and access to knowledge to students? And last year, he was awarded the prestigious Science and Technology Policy Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and to work on policy at the U.S. Executive Branch, where he currently serves in Spanish and the National Institute of Health as an SPF in its fellow evolution, health and science policy and research to identify the basics to identify the best strategies for successfully integrating Evidence-Based interventions within clinical, public and global health settings.
00:02:18:15 - 00:02:20:12
Speaker 1
Welcome Fernando, to the podcast.
00:02:22:03 - 00:02:30:18
Speaker 2
Thank you very much, Elizabeth. It's a pleasure to be here with you and to share this moment also with all of your listeners. Thank you for having so brilliant.
00:02:30:23 - 00:02:48:08
Speaker 1
You receive two fellowships, all E.R. and the esteemed PBS from a year since the only fellowship is from within the total tenets. A little bit about this fellowship. What is this fellowship among so that our listeners has an idea about it?
00:02:49:05 - 00:03:17:19
Speaker 2
Perfect. Taking a step back first to explain what we are is which again, open educational resources. As you said in the opening and these are educational materials, everything from a single lesson plan to an entire textbook. For example, the search, the safe students and the teachers money because they are free to use, customize and share. And one of the things interesting for OCR is that they continue to be customized and developed because they are good, they are open resource.
00:03:17:19 - 00:03:38:22
Speaker 2
So you can create a resource and others can continue to contribute to it and it will continue evolving. So we are guided by the idea again of high quality education materials that should also be available to everyone. More specifically at Touro, I believe was back in 2018, the sort of library information literacy director which I believe her name was Sarah Temby.
00:03:39:16 - 00:04:08:05
Speaker 2
She created this OCR initiative, which was sponsored initially by the National Library of Medicine and the last I heard of it, I think since the program fully started, they estimated that about 300,000 in textbook costs had been saved by these or your projects. Now, the fellowship in specific, as you were asking, the fellowship is intended to support faculty to to develop them these boys for using their force.
00:04:08:05 - 00:04:30:15
Speaker 2
And this can mean identifying or adopting existing where you are they already have, or creating original yarn from scratch and these projects are expected to be put to use in one or more of their classes in the year following the fellowship period. So the fellowship tends to take about six months. So after that period, you would then have a final product to be shared with others.
00:04:30:15 - 00:05:00:17
Speaker 2
In my case, they did participate, and this fellowship had to do with my realization that there's an overwhelming amount of information out there and that it can be challenging for students to scan through all of that and determine what is in fact high. You So a lot of the academic materials can be expensive, as we all know, and not all students may have this ability to acquire appropriate and especially up to date resources hence why we often see students with old textbooks or things that they can get from eBay or something like that.
00:05:01:02 - 00:05:27:03
Speaker 2
So many times what one would wind up depending on Google to find something. And don't get me wrong, Google is a very resource for great information. Material guess if you at least know what you're looking for. But there is also a lot of possible biases in the results that can be targeted to you. There is also a lot of ads, so the materials you get may not necessarily be reliable or fit appropriately with your force.
00:05:27:13 - 00:05:50:03
Speaker 2
So in one of my medical anatomy courses called histology there for those who are not familiar and we focus on the micro anatomy and the cell biology, the students are frequently asking me where could they find question banks that would go along with my material And there aren't that many. And the ones that do exist, they don't really focus on the same structure of my course.
00:05:50:11 - 00:06:17:05
Speaker 2
So I ended up creating my own question bank that is now use across five different courses and the two campuses of Touro Come New York, which the Royal College of Medicine, which has a campus in Harlem, and one in Middletown. So again, for me and specifically was the opportunity to create something that I could using my course, but because it's now open resource, others will be able to import into their force and even change them moving forward.
00:06:18:17 - 00:06:43:07
Speaker 1
Wow. That's, that's, that's quite something. 300,000 books available through only. So I wonder how many faculty at tomorrow actually know about this only R and if there's a key message that you want to send to the faculty as to why they should think about these open educational resources what can be the message?
00:06:44:07 - 00:07:05:22
Speaker 2
Well, to begin with is important that they know that all full time, part time, as well as adjunct faculty, even if you're still hired but haven't started yet, you're still qualified to be applying for this fellowship. So across all of our university campuses aren't eligible to apply. So if you have an idea for a project that could benefit your students, why not go ahead with it?
00:07:05:22 - 00:07:20:12
Speaker 2
So it is also one of those situations where we have an idea that we keep postponing, right? We all have like the thing that we want to do but never find the time. So once you are in the fellowship, you were able to finally protect some time in your schedule to get that idea off your mind and into practice.
00:07:20:21 - 00:07:55:08
Speaker 2
And you do that with additional logistical support from the librarians. So through the Fellowship Faculty, you can receive training in education in New York from the two librarians with specialized specifically in open education, one of them being Curt Snyder, who's currently overseeing this program. And when you become a fellow, the faculty will have about six months, as I mentioned before, to develop the Warrior Project with the support of the two librarians as well as the faculty, because we're also in their own fellowship cohort, and it receives support through monthly group meetings.
00:07:55:19 - 00:08:19:04
Speaker 2
And in the end, fellows are then encouraged to publish or present their experiences with this point. So, for example, I part of the first of all, your fellows and after the first round of fellowship, which was 20, 20, 20, 21, the Library Provost's Office organized a webinar when Dr. Olalekan and I presented our or your fellowships project at total.
00:08:19:15 - 00:08:48:16
Speaker 2
So in terms of key messages, I could perhaps say first there's an aspect again of student access aside from the financial savings classes start with or you are a consistent challenge to create educational outcomes equal to or even better than those taught with traditional commercial materials because again, you're tailoring something and students have a consistent free essence access to their materials, which is not always the case with these traditional resources.
00:08:49:04 - 00:09:17:09
Speaker 2
Students don't often buy the required textbooks. They will mention, for example, of the effect they are on affordable, often relying on sharing a book with a peer or copying sections of a book from the library. And this is just one of the many aspects. Second, because you are the one developing, it is therefore customizable so or you are to me to be customizable so that everything structure can adapt to maturity would be most relevant to their specific student population.
00:09:17:17 - 00:09:42:18
Speaker 2
And third is, again, the relevance or you are can be always up to date because one of the open licensing that allows for edits and adaptations, which is to say you will open for others, you can change, contribute and evolve it. Also, their digital nature makes updating them in this continuous process because they're now sharing them digitally. And others can contribute and continue to to have them around.
00:09:43:02 - 00:09:49:16
Speaker 2
And if you consider especially the world post-pandemic digital technologies, especially in education, they're very necessary.
00:09:50:15 - 00:10:12:20
Speaker 1
Awesome. Awesome. So thank you for giving, you know, talking to us about the all year fellowship. I know from books, you moved on to the next fellowship, which was through the in its the SDP fellowship, which is the one that you currently own. So tell us a little more about it. Like how did it come to go online and how was the application process?
00:10:13:22 - 00:10:22:05
Speaker 1
What were some of the tips that you would give to faculty who are thinking about applying for this scholarship? So tell us a little bit about this fellowship.
00:10:22:15 - 00:10:42:22
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, we are yes, as we often call it, which again, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I was quite familiar with it because it is a prestigious I think even Benjamin Franklin, I think had something to do with it. But back in 2019, on top of everything else, that was also in the middle of my mess of public health at Harvard University.
00:10:43:07 - 00:11:11:07
Speaker 2
And they have a career and professional development office there, organized several meetings with the goal of empowering the students and advance their career within public health. So among these, there were some opportunities to meet alumni and understand what they were doing and network with them. One of these happened in Washington, D.C., and I got to meet the first person there, runner who was not only an alumni from Harvard, but also an alumni from this ASU Science and Technology Policy Fellowship.
00:11:11:16 - 00:11:29:06
Speaker 2
And she kept mentioning how this opportunity defined her career. And then there was the before and after in her career, because one of the things she had learned from the fellowship. So I had the chance to talk to her after the event. And she told me how she had been able to gain hands on politics through challenging assignments.
00:11:29:06 - 00:11:58:15
Speaker 2
So that really caught my attention anyway. Why did I, in fact, decide to pursue that? Have to do with the fact that I have the opportunity throughout my career to be exposed to many facets of medicine, to be a physician, medical professor, public health professional and all those things. I realized I was often downstream from the policy, often wondering why certain things in the clinical practice in the front or say, awarded the way they were, if they were not necessarily as effective.
00:11:58:16 - 00:12:19:19
Speaker 2
So I would often wonder why upstream those decisions were being made. So I didn't have much opportunity to be involved with government and that elicit my interest also in this fellowship. So I felt that this fellowship would provide me with an opportunity to apply my scientific background to help bridge the gap between the technical knowledge and the effective policy.
00:12:20:19 - 00:12:37:10
Speaker 2
So with my life rooted in academia, I was looking forward to this opportunity, even if temporarily to have an active role in the frontlines and experience the fast paced political arena and learning about the development and implementation of policies that came later be skills transferred to my students.
00:12:38:09 - 00:13:07:05
Speaker 1
Awesome. So in essence, what you're telling the listeners is that if you have an interest in developing policy especially in science and technology, this is a good fellowship for you and you will be placed into various fact or branches depending on your interest and the availability. So if there is any interest for developing policies being in that upstream, make the decisions, this it may be a fellowship that the listeners can think about.
00:13:08:06 - 00:13:17:21
Speaker 1
So now that you are in this fellowship, right, you are you have been there. So what is your project during this fellowship?
00:13:18:18 - 00:13:44:15
Speaker 2
Well, as you mentioned, you get the chance you'll be placing different areas of the federal government. In my particular case, after doing interviews, I chose to serve my fellowship with the National Institutes of Health, which whenever mentioning their name is always good to say. Everything I'm saying represents my own opinion and does not represent the opinion of the federal government in any way, shape or form.
00:13:45:02 - 00:14:08:11
Speaker 2
So as a fellow of me working on health and science policy and research to identify the best strategies for successfully integrating Evidence-Based interventions within clinic, public and global health settings. So pretty much how can we compress everything that is being brought up in the literature and bring this to the bedside and applicability to the patient guide?
00:14:09:02 - 00:14:13:02
Speaker 1
So it's like the implementation science that you're talking about.
00:14:13:16 - 00:14:38:04
Speaker 2
Correct? So again, this evidence based intervention has to do with pretty much what is the implementation science. So since most of the listeners are faculty, I can perhaps given more tangible example by making us reflect of the general structure of publication in academia. Right. So in academia, not only a total, but like academia at large in the whole world, we we in order to progress you have to create publications.
00:14:38:14 - 00:15:02:11
Speaker 2
But the way academia works is that you focus on a project you want to do, you publish that, and then you give yourself a tap on the back and say, I published it. Everybody celebrates. You move on to the next publication. But we don't often stop and wonder, Okay, who is reading this? Who is actually getting the information I just created and published and bringing that to application?
00:15:02:18 - 00:15:32:07
Speaker 2
So that's pretty much the focus of implementation science. So the future of implementation science seeks to systematically close this gap between what we know and what we do, which we often called the no do gap. And binding fine and addressing the barriers, there's little or halt the uptake of proven health intervention and Evidence-Based practices. So an example perhaps I can give here with a practical example that many may be familiar with is the example of penicillin.
00:15:33:02 - 00:16:05:15
Speaker 2
So Alexander Fleming, that I hope most of you know back in 1928 was analyzing the laboratory, the effects that penicillin has in combating bacteria, but it didn't get to be used in patients until 15 years later when Howard formally evaluated penicillin humans and then alongside the team of scientists develop a way to mass productive and make it available to the military and the soldiers who were dying of infection during the World War too.
00:16:05:24 - 00:16:55:14
Speaker 2
So this lag or time delay is where implementation science or implementation research would try to act between the findings and that actually becoming available. So the take home point for this example is the world between the research finding and neutralization in practice is actually long and a lot is lost in that pipeline, whereas the movement of evidence based practices into routine clinical or public health use is not as spontaneous and requires a focus afterwards, and that is implementation science, for example, investigating what is available in the scientific knowledge and how they can be streamlined into practice, as well as assessing if certain findings have been demonstrating the smaller scale and will sustain their effectiveness once they
00:16:55:14 - 00:17:21:22
Speaker 2
are brought up into a larger, more practical environment. So going back to what I was saying in terms of publication, according to a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it takes about 17 years for only 14% of new scientific discoveries. To enter a day to day clinical practice. In addition, Americans receive on average only half of the recommended preventive, acute and long term quality health care.
00:17:22:06 - 00:17:44:08
Speaker 2
This concern exists across numerous diseases and conditions and and knowledge on the flow of health care. Discovery and health policy is a critical skill that has to be expected from physicians, but we don't often focus on that. So there is a gap between the scientific discoveries and their implementation and availability to the population of the patients That's great.
00:17:44:18 - 00:18:01:05
Speaker 1
Reducing the lag between what we discover and actually making our discoveries useful to the population. Now, keeping in mind that many of our listeners are not from health care. How can the implementation science be used by a non-employee and faculty?
00:18:01:21 - 00:18:25:24
Speaker 2
Well, my focus has been the health care side, but so I don't necessarily have a practical example for health care. Effective. Nonetheless, everything goes back to what we were saying about the no do gap write about systematically trying to close that gap between what we know and what we do. So that aspect can then be brought up to every field.
00:18:26:08 - 00:19:00:07
Speaker 2
So whatever your field may be, even if it's outside medicine or even outside science, if you're noticing that certain things don't work in a practical sense in the front lines per say, you can then try to identify what is the knowledge that is, publish what is known, and then try to investigate within that pipeline what can be measured and identify the factors that impact across the multiple levels, including all of the stakeholders and their organizations, and what is in fact being lost throughout the discovery and the implementation.
00:19:01:04 - 00:19:25:01
Speaker 1
It's so true. And I think especially as a university, many of us as faculty may see things where things are normal, working in the classroom I'd be wonder why this is not working, or we do this partnership of teaching and learning and then maybe it is not implemented rightly into the classrooms implementation science is something that could very well be used in the educational arena.
00:19:25:07 - 00:19:44:06
Speaker 1
We're able to give in trying to bring make sure that our students learn in the most efficient and effective manner. So let's sing it to our faculty or a listener who's listening to this one student on a little more AM on implementation science. How can they learn more about this?
00:19:45:15 - 00:20:23:07
Speaker 2
Well, since they are tural facts, I would say first feel free to retell to me and I'll and I'll connect to with more resources. And even some online courses there are available even hooking up with our first topic of who you are. There are open educational resources also for implementation science. They're available to all. But if I had to recommend a book there is a particular book called Dissemination Implementation Research in Health, and there is a subtitle also called Translating Science to Practice, which I think is now is in the second edition is a it's one of the authors that I now remember.
00:20:23:07 - 00:20:46:09
Speaker 2
The name is Ross Brown. So that was the book that I use when I first get acquainted with implementation science and can always be a first step for those who are in a way uninitiated. But again, implementation science is what connects well. We all we're doing in terms of research, wherever they might be in medicine or outside of medicine, and we expect the things that we're publishing are actually coming to fruition.
00:20:46:20 - 00:20:58:10
Speaker 2
So implementation research is in fact what is focusing into making that possible. So I encourage all faculty to become acquainted with this awesome well.
00:20:58:13 - 00:21:23:04
Speaker 1
So to our listeners, if you are thinking about open education resources, if you're thinking about the all year fellowship by the total university or maybe be a part of the two place and doing in policy fellowship or thinking of implementation science, bridging between the research and university experience, whether it is in the clinic or in a classroom verities.
00:21:24:12 - 00:21:43:01
Speaker 1
Here you have Fernando Bruno, who is our associate professor with Victoria College of Medicine and the Meditative Campus. Please feel free to reach out to him. So, Fernando, thank you so much for being our guest today and thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Until next time.
00:21:43:16 - 00:21:51:24
Speaker 2
Thank you very much. A little bit. And think for the listeners to sticking around and getting to know a little more about where you are. Implementation science. Thank you.