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What are the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals? What are the biggest challenges in pursuing and achieving those goals? How does technology play a role? And what’s the best way for government, academia, and industry to cooperate and collaborate in support of fundamental research? We will learn those answers and more in this episode with Declan Kirrane, the Chairman of the Science Summit at the United Nations General Assembly, and founder and managing director of ISC Intelligence in Science. Declan has more than 25 years of experience as a global senior advisor to governments and industry on science research, science policy and related regulation. He has been actively promoting a more significant role for science within the context of the United Nations General Assembly since 2010. This has culminated in the annual Science Summit within the context of the UN’s General Assembly. The focus of the Summit is on the role and contribution of science to attain the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – or SDGs. The current edition – UNGA78 - takes place from September 12-29, and will bring together thought leaders, scientists, technologists, policymakers, philanthropists, journalists, and community leaders to increase health science and citizen collaborations to promote the importance of supporting science. And we are thrilled that Oracle will be part of the Science Summit with a few of our executives speaking and attending, including Alison Derbenwick Miller, global head and VP of Oracle for Research.

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Episode Transcript:

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00;00;00;00 - 00;00;22;29

What are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals? What are the biggest challenges in pursuing and achieving those goals? And what's the best way for government, academia and industry to cooperate and collaborate in support of basic research? We'll get the answers to all this and more on Research in Action.

00;00;23;02 - 00;00;49;08

Hi, and welcome back to Research and Action, brought to you by Oracle for Research. I'm Mike Stiles and today's distinguished guest is Declan Kirrane, who is the chairman of the Science Summit at the United Nations General Assembly and the founder and managing director of ISC Intelligence and Science. And we're talking to a guy with more than 25 years of experience as a global senior advisor to governments and industry on science research, science policy and regulation around science.

00;00;49;10 - 00;01;17;07

Declan has been promoting a bigger role for science in the context of the U.N. General Assembly since 2010, and that's led to an annual science summit that focuses on the role and contribution of science to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. The current edition UNGA 78 is happening September 12th through 29th and will bring together thought leaders, scientists, technologists, policymakers, philanthropists, journalists and community leaders.

00;01;17;09 - 00;01;37;02

We'll talk about increasing health science and citizen collaborations and why it's important to support science overall. Now, Oracle's actually going to be part of that science summit a few of the executives will be there speaking, including Alison Derbenwick Miller, who's global head and VP of Oracle for Research. Declan, thank you so much for being with us today.

00;01;37;08 - 00;01;58;13

Thanks, Michael. Great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. Delighted to be here. What we want to hear all about the science summit at the U.N. General Assembly. But before we go there, tell me what got you not just into science, but science policies and your role in creating this summit? Well, first is, I suppose, the simple answer to that is happenstance.

00;01;58;13 - 00;02;21;10

I have to tell you, it was not planned. My primary degree is the history of art. And then I did law and probably needed a job after all of that. And then as a lot of people did in the late, late eighties, emigrated to the U.S. of A and on the basis that there was nothing going on in Ireland.

00;02;21;10 - 00;02;51;23

So opportunity beckoned and therefore from that worked on Wall Street and at a boutique mutual fund company. And then between one thing and another, I ended up in a in a boutique similar boutique company in Paris. And from that to Greece and from that, I got into more consulting side of things and from that started working for global multilateral bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF on a contract basis.

00;02;51;23 - 00;03;23;25

And then from that got more into telecoms and from that into into science coming out. And I suppose from the area of telecoms, infrastructure and data rather than, if you like, a bank scientist. And I suppose my history of art background gave me a wonderful perspective on policy, at least that's what I argue. And, and from that I got very interested and from the insights, but partly because the European Commission invited me and a couple of others to set up a dissemination service.

00;03;23;25 - 00;03;57;19

It's called Cordis. Cordis and the Cordis Information Service was designed by the European Commission to provide information on ongoing collaborative research and to provide information on publicly funded research opportunities in the course. The reason the European Union did that was to was to ensure that the information resulting from funding they're providing reached a very, very wide audience. So my job was to to do that and we built that out and that brought me into the area of science policy.

00;03;57;22 - 00;04;27;19

And I gradually began to understand the huge importance of science policy. And of course, 20 years ago science policy was not a thing, you know, it doesn't really exist in terms of policy making headlines, but it gradually came to be and as you know, it's it's part of the lexicon now. A lot of governments around the world have science policy priorities, and it's recognized as a driver for economic development and global competitiveness and driving solutions to global challenges.

00;04;27;19 - 00;04;51;05

So sciences is a thing, but 20 years ago it wasn't. So it's a relatively recent and I began quickly to appreciate the policy dimension of that, and that led me to work on policy that led me to understand policy mechanisms. And, you know, from my standpoint, I mean, there's no point in looking at some global challenges or many global challenges from a national perspective.

00;04;51;12 - 00;05;21;24

Really, it has to be global, it has to be international. That led me to engage with the United Nations. And from that, we just started to build from, as you say, from 2010, to start to build, engage with nations. And I really want to stress these were designed to be very, very simple to present not to a scientific forum, but to the U.N. for it to the mother ship, to the General Assembly, to diplomats, to policy and political leaders, and show them what science is.

00;05;21;24 - 00;05;43;04

And to give you a practical example, our first meeting was on biobanking. And you know, the main attention, wasn't it? What's biobanking? You see, that's exactly what we want. The want the question we wanted them to ask. And from Matt and that first mission, I think there's about 18 people in the room and we had about four or five diplomats last year at the Science summit.

00;05;43;06 - 00;06;07;02

We had approximately 60,000 participants. We had just under 400 sessions and we had 1600 speakers. So we've come a long way. And that really now is it's it's it's established. But we want to keep promoting. We want to keep science in the eye of the U.N. and we want to ensure that the future recognizes the contribution of science.

00;06;07;05 - 00;06;27;29

That's quite a journey. I think you did just about everything except science. Are you sure you weren't in the circus as well? Yeah, well, it's it's, you know, it's all true, you know, So, yeah, it's it's put a lot of it. Last 20 years has been on primarily on science. Yeah. Well in the intro I mentioned the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs.

00;06;27;29 - 00;06;54;00

And our listeners are pretty savvy. They probably know about those, but I'm not savvy. So what are SDGs and how do they speak to global health and humanity in the in the in the mid nineties the the United Nations. And when I say the United Nations, I mean many of the United Nations constituent entities and agencies obviously were very concerned about what we generally call global challenges.

00;06;54;00 - 00;07;18;29

And in the area of health and other forms of well-being, the environment, climate, food security and safety and so on and so forth. And that led to a consensus that there needed to be, quote unquote, you know, how's this for a cliche? We have to do something. So that we have to do something resulted in the Millennium Development Goals, which were, as you can imagine, launched on the year 2000.

00;07;19;02 - 00;07;44;01

And they set forward these goals to to  address challenges. And that that 50 years went by pretty quickly. And that then led on to a similar mechanism where you identify a challenge, you define a response to it, and then you allocate specific targets within that and get everyone to sign up to that and off you go now.

00;07;44;03 - 00;08;12;18

So that then that broad approach was repeated for the United Nations SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, of which there are 17. And they cover the headlines that you'd imagine between poverty reduction, hunger reduction, improved health, a life below water, life on land, addressing obviously biodiversity, climate and many other areas. And then we're in the middle of these now.

00;08;12;21 - 00;08;45;10

But already the world is turning its attention to the post SDG agenda. And this is where this probably where we are now. The United Nations is organizing the summit of the future September 2024, and that I suppose you could characterize that meeting rather I do as a a banging of heads together because there is a sense of crisis, there is a sense the SDGs are not being achieved, that progress towards the attainment of the SDGs is insufficient.

00;08;45;12 - 00;09;07;19

It is exclusive. It excludes many constituencies, many countries, and again, I won't enumerate them here, but I just present that as as the scenario. So there's now a lot of momentum behind what we know. What do we do next? Why old humble viewers? I don't think it's going to be a if you like, a goals oriented process. I think that's too simplistic.

00;09;07;19 - 00;09;41;01

The world. I think as we found out, is much, much more complex. And I think the issue of inclusion and equity are issues that are present in a way that they were not when the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals were designed 30 and 50 years ago, respectively. And I think this equity dimension is going to give a far stronger voice to less developed nations.

00;09;41;01 - 00;10;07;05

And just on the back of an envelope calculation, I think if you take the OECD countries and change, you've probably got 30 nations that we could call a developed. And then I suppose the big questions that what about everybody else? And that is becoming a very stark consideration, which was not there. And this needs to be addressed in terms of inclusion and equity to a much, much greater extent than is currently the case.

00;10;07;05 - 00;10;37;01

And arguably then will lead to a more successful approach to whatever succeeds the SDGs, the SDGs. I'm interested in the mechanics behind that because I'm just kind of reading between the lines of what you're saying and it's like for this thing to have true accountability and for these goals to have any teeth at all. There does need to be a someone accountable, be a very good grasp of who the participants are going to be and some form of deadline.

00;10;37;04 - 00;11;01;19

Absolutely correct. Mike And that that was that the plan A the problem with that in in in in a word is it doesn't really work you've so many moving parts you've so many constituencies that it's you know, having this set table of goals and table of targets and allocating milestones know simply doesn't work. Now, why doesn't it work?

00;11;01;21 - 00;11;29;07

I believe in my view it is that many less developed nations don't have the wherewithal to achieve these SDGs. One needs investment, one needs skills, one needs training, one needs cooperation, one is finance. I mean, these are all requirements to make change it, particularly in the area of or particularly in every area. But if you look at health, if you look at energy transformation, if you look at digital transformation, they don't happen without moolah, without money.

00;11;29;14 - 00;11;48;22

So the question is, well, where's I coming from? The answer, I'm afraid, is it's not. And that leaves a lot of they again, when I say lesser developed nations, I mean that is the majority that's 150 nations on the on the on the on a rough calculation. And they're not they don't feel involved. They don't feel they're taken seriously in terms of support for the investment.

00;11;48;24 - 00;12;13;12

And I think they're looking looking at the developed world and they're saying, well, okay, you benefited from carbonized development then and now we're supposed to do on carbonized development and how is that going to work for us? And there's no answer to that. So I think it's extremely complex. And as you say, trying to build consensus around this is extremely difficult because any move forward does require political consensus as very, very hard to get these days.

00;12;13;12 - 00;12;30;16

I mean, you can you can look at Ukraine, you can look at you can look at the Sahel, you can look at many parts of the world where consensus are at a political level. It's very difficult, if not impossible. And then you factor into that, well, how do you then adopt action plans? How do you adopt roadmaps? Again, extremely difficult.

00;12;30;16 - 00;12;54;14

So I in my view, the the SDGs have come a bit unstuck because of the inability of developed nations to provide the necessary wherewithal, including funding. And therefore, of course, the other side of that coin is the inability of of many, many nations to advance those objectives, to achieve the goals that have been set out to reach those targets.

00;12;54;14 - 00;13;32;09

And that simply is not happening. And on SDG eight in the High-Level Policy Forum in July of this year and the the process of reporting on SDH was abandoned for reasons which I think are quite obvious, and no one had anything to report. So I point to that specifically. And also I was with a number of African nation ambassadors for dinner in Brussels two weeks ago, and they pointed out that they've stopped wearing their SDG lapel pins, you see.

00;13;32;11 - 00;13;56;13

And there's two reasons for that. One is in protest at the slow progress towards the SDGs, and secondly, because of, as they see it, their exclusion from the decision making process associated with the SDGs, which, as you can imagine, has a, you know, an annual review mechanism and and and all that sort of stuff. They feel excluded from that.

00;13;56;13 - 00;14;27;04

And my own view is they are for the reasons I've I think I've mentioned or alluded to and this brings this this promotes exclusion and inequity. And again, to repeat this, this wasn't in fashion 50 years ago to the extent that it is today. Now, it is a very, very strong policy and political force. And the institutions, the multilateral institutions that take leadership on these issues now have to find ways to to address that and to build inclusion in a very, very significant and meaningful way.

00;14;27;04 - 00;14;50;08

It's not just the family photo opportunities. It's making sure that these communities, that the stakeholders feel they're involved and they are involved. They're seeing the benefits. And I suppose to that extent, it's it's you know, it's politics as usual. Boy, those those challenges are just huge. It's it's quite an undertaking to to pursue those. But I guess that's what also makes it exciting as well.

00;14;50;10 - 00;15;11;10

Since this show is called Research and Action, we do talk a lot about the need to knock down barriers and support research, but research has several stages from basic all the way through clinical. What is especially important about supporting basic research and getting that right? What are those benefits? I suppose so. Simply put, you know, that's where it all starts.

00;15;11;10 - 00;15;45;05

And when we talk about basic research, we talk about basic research, but I would also call it pre competitive research. So that's a start for, you know, is everybody's friends and everybody is collaborating before they before they apply for a patent or before they discover discover something they can monetize or exploit or innovation in whichever way. And I think a very important aspect of this is the fact that it's by and large government funded, and this gives it a very important dimension, not to mention is seeding the potential for innovation.

00;15;45;07 - 00;16;08;28

And I often reflect that if you if you the government plays a huge role in science and technology. And now I don't have the details in front of me, but, you know, as far as I understand it, about a Tesla Enterprise wouldn't be where it is today without a small business loan from the US government. And of course, Mr. Gates was a beneficiary of government contracts at a very early stage in the development of Microsoft.

00;16;08;28 - 00;16;30;01

So just to point there to the importance of government funding across the board with respect to the government investment in science and technology in the pre competitive space, there's a clear recognition that without a synchrotron or without the government investing in synchrotron or large scale science facilities, then I think we're not going to have stakeholders who can build those.

00;16;30;03 - 00;16;52;12

So it simply simply won't happen. Many, many outcomes I think are evident in terms of the investment and in science and technology. You know, basically we have an advance in knowledge. Basic research seeks to understand the fundamental principles underlying various phenomena. And I think the curiosity driven research around this then leads to much innovation. But of course you don't know that at the beginning.

00;16;52;12 - 00;17;10;28

So I think there has to be a very strong political commitment to Blue skies research. And again, I stress the word political committee because it is a policy decision for a government, any government to invest in pretty competitive research, in science, capacity building, which is predominantly pre competitive and on in there in basic science. So I think that's that's hugely important.

00;17;10;28 - 00;17;34;11

Just to point to the policy dimension, I think that then leads to various innovations and that that that is applying. So you see a very clear narrative between basic research, innovation and applied research. Many groundbreaking innovations and technological advancements have emerged from the discoveries made in basic research. And I think this needs to be spelt out very often when a policymaker gets up in the morning.

00;17;34;18 - 00;17;56;18

That can be a complicated narrative. You know what I want to be getting from this? Why spend vast sums of money on basic research, blah, blah, blah? But I think when you look at the evidence, I think then the case is is compelling. But of course, that needs to be understood continuously, primarily by policymakers. And it does bring long term benefits, The outcomes of basic research might not lead to immediate benefits or applications.

00;17;56;18 - 00;18;25;27

However, these insights often lay the groundwork for future breakthroughs, which could and very often do have significant societal, economic or technological impacts over time. Problem solving is another reason to fund and do basic research educational value. Basic research plays a critical role in educating the next generation or generations, indeed, of scientists, researchers and thinkers. It provides a training ground for students to learn research methodologies, critical thinking and analytical skills.

00;18;26;00 - 00;18;52;06

And these values have multiple applications, multiple applications. And then we have cross-disciplinary insights. I think this is self evident. Basic research often leads to unexpected connections between different fields of study. These interdisciplinary insights can spark collaborations and innovations that otherwise wouldn't come to the fore. Intellectual curiosity, I think, needs also to be highlighted. Then we have the benefits coming from scientific advancement.

00;18;52;10 - 00;19;26;18

So I think Mike, there are many, many, many benefits in that. And I'd just like to point to really one example of basic research. You may not be a follower of radio astronomy or you might be about South Africa won a global competition to build the square kilometer Array telescope, the SKA, and that was a global competition in 2011 against the UK, against Chile, China, Brazil and Canada.

00;19;26;18 - 00;19;50;25

I believe there may be one or two other countries there as South Africa won the right to host and to build the UK and it is now doing that. It's probably a 30 year project. But here you have an example of of an African nation competing to build a hugely complex scientific instrument in the middle of the Karoo desert.

00;19;50;25 - 00;20;30;21

Now why do that? Many reasons to do it. But one of the compelling reasons that I learned from exposure to the project is the enormous commitment that the South African government and now, of course, to have partner countries, including Australia, that huge commitment they have made to education and training the next generation through the scale. And you will see in the system you'll see that many US multinationals, the Dell Corporation, IBM, Microsoft have very strong project association and collaboration with the UK and South Africa.

00;20;30;24 - 00;21;00;04

When the Economist wrote about the UK in 2016, I believe it was, they said this is the world's largest science project. And I think, you know, just it's worth reflecting on that. And this has enormous, enormous future potential. It has existing benefits to the scientific community and of course it is a huge flagship idea that provides a lightning rod for scientific collaboration across Africa and across the world.

00;21;00;11 - 00;21;26;13

At a very practical level, it brings many scientists to visit the facility to work with African and South African collaborators. So this is an ongoing benefit. I think a wonderful example of what our research infrastructure is, what basic science is, and why it should be funded. Yeah, what you just described is an enormous success story. But, you know, candidly, my optimism is challenged because so much of this does rely on government participation.

00;21;26;19 - 00;21;54;08

Yet it feels like as long as money and politics is in the picture, those are the anchors that can weigh things down. And against that backdrop is the science summit. So how did the science summit become a reality and was there any resistance to it or did anybody think this wasn't a good idea or not worth doing? The as far as I've learned, I mean, the response has been universally very, very positive, extremely positive.

00;21;54;11 - 00;22;26;03

And that's because the science summit is designed aimed to advance a greater awareness of the contribution of science to the SDGs. Now, how do you do that? You do that by bringing folk together. And those folk are not just the scientists. I mean, we're not organizing an ecology conference, we're not organizing a radio astronomy conference, we're organizing a science engagement process with U.N. leadership.

00;22;26;06 - 00;22;54;09

And more than that, we are showing how science needs to be inclusive. So to that end, we have a very strong narrative around inclusion. We have a very strong narrative around development, finance for scientific education, for science, performance and investment in science. And through doing that, we are education policymakers. We are engaging with policy makers. And I need to stress this invariably is it is a process.

00;22;54;16 - 00;23;15;28

But at the end of the day, policymakers that I have engaged with at many levels in Africa, Europe and the United States, they want to make the world a better place. I don't think there's any any doubt about that at very often in that quest, they are very remote from the outputs of science for the evidence that is there that shows that science delivers.

00;23;15;28 - 00;23;38;28

Of course, it's in the system. But very often the political system of political decision making is very human. It's a very natural process. It's not always empirical. And I think as you know, and possibly in in the Western world, we see that policy making is becoming more political with a small P. So it's into that environment that we are going and showing how science makes a difference.

00;23;39;05 - 00;24;08;26

Practically. We're showing how science delivers on the SDGs, we're showing how science delivers on the future challenges. And with reference to a very important aspect, we're also highlighting the the importance of enabling access to data now, and this is you'll probably be familiar with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, and there are other regulatory regimes in in the United States and Canada, Japan and Brazil and and elsewhere.

00;24;08;28 - 00;24;33;19

And now we are looking at the evolution of regulation concerning artificial intelligence. Now, these regulatory processes as one outcome have impacts on access to data and the use of data for scientific purposes. There is no global regulator, there's no global policymaker. How do we address a global coordination on these issues? And that's something we want to raise within the context of Science Summit to ensure that science is data enabled.

00;24;33;21 - 00;25;00;25

When we talk about science capacity building, essentially we are talking about improving the flow of data, access to data, use of data from machine learning and AI and other purposes, and extending that capability globally. And when that can happen, then you will see dramatically improved outcomes in terms of health research at the environment, biodiversity, energy and many, many other areas.

00;25;00;29 - 00;25;44;06

But we're not there yet. That very much is in the future. So we're trying to align the debate around the objective of creating these new innovations with the need for aligning energy policy, energy technology and other information technology around alignment on regulations. That's huge, huge importance. So we see that. We see the opportunity after the United Nations General Assembly to talk to governments, to talk to political leaders, to talk to Balsillie was to talk to diplomats, to talk to regulators, to talk to bureaucrats and show them what this is, how this matters, and very importantly, how they can include optimized policies to support science in future policies at the bloc level, at nation level.

00;25;44;06 - 00;26;13;20

And we have many, many meetings bringing forward scientists to show what they do, what's necessary in terms of government regulation and support to enable. So we're talking about creating the enabling policy and regular Tory environment for more and better science. And funnily enough, we don't say that's more that's about more money. We don't feel that. We don't think that what there is, is more opportunity and a great need for alignment at government and policy level.

00;26;13;23 - 00;26;39;06

And if every country in the world goes it alone in terms of creating regulation and creating policies, then we're looking at extreme fragmentation. There is much, much untapped potential for governments to work together, and that's one reason we're very happy to be working with Oracle, because, you know, from there, you know, as a company and, you know, forgive me if this is too simplistic, but they, they they create these machines that can communicate data.

00;26;39;06 - 00;27;07;29

And this is a this is a vital and vital a vital need globally. And how they do that and future, I think, will point to many, many future opportunities, which is a very important consideration, because with the science summit and at the level of the U.N., there's there's a huge recognition of the need to work with industry players and the importance of working with industry to deliver innovations, because it's not going to be a university center in it.

00;27;07;29 - 00;27;33;27

With the greatest respect to Cork University in Ireland, they're not going to be making the mess that's going to come through a company. So and industry. So this collaboration opportunity between academia, between governments and industry, I think is ripe for transformation, I think has enormous potential to address global challenges. So can you give us kind of a feel for what kind of speakers and sessions can be expected at the summit?

00;27;34;04 - 00;28;02;24

Yes, Michael, we've got a very inclusive approach to the summit, so we're covering a lot of things, but I suppose I would accept that we have a bias towards health on the health research. On the 13th of September, we have an all day plenary on on One Health, which is a perspective that brings together planet people and animal health into a, if you like, a one world view.

00;28;02;27 - 00;28;26;10

We have a lot of amazing speakers from the five continents who will be coming to that meeting. And what we want to do then is this is relatively rare. It's a relatively new area. By that I mean it's a relatively new or a policymaking. So where want to advance policymaking in this area? We want to also promote interdisciplinary research and show how research matters across these three areas because they cannot be addressed in isolation.

00;28;26;12 - 00;28;56;06

And we'd argue at the moment, by and large, that they are. If you look at national funding systems and national priorities and all the rest of it, they look at animal health or they look at human health or they look at biodiversity. But looking at all three I think is vital. That's our that's our flagship session on Wednesday the 13th on the 14th, Thursday the 14th, we're going to focus on on pandemic preparedness and we're going to bring together the leadership from the National Research Foundation in South Africa, from the African Union Commission, from the European Union.

00;28;56;06 - 00;29;33;16

Delighted to have Irene North steps. The director for the People Directorate in Brussels is coming to join us. For three days. We have Professor Cortes at Lucca from the Medical University of Graz, who leads many European Union research initiatives. But he was the main instigator of the European Union's biobanking research infrastructure, of biobanking, of molecular resources. We should infrastructure, which does pretty much as it says on the can, and we're looking to create a UN version of that, if you like, And look at how this capacity for biobanking is going to contribute.

00;29;33;16 - 00;29;57;01

So and pandemic burden, it's very, very important that we also have President Biden's science adviser, Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the and I and the in the United States, Then we will also have representatives from Dr. Sao Victor. So from the U.S. Academy for Medicine, National Academy for Medicine. He'll be presenting the US approach to pandemic preparedness, which is called 100 days Mission.

00;29;57;06 - 00;30;22;17

What you Need to Do in the first hundred Days. We're very excited about that and very, very much looking forward to using that as a template for a global approach. And while there's been a lot of focus on global strategies, which we obviously very much support, we want to take that global strategy approach to the level of action in terms of what capacity is needed, where's that capacity needed, How can the capacity be delivered?

00;30;22;19 - 00;31;09;02

So very much looking forward to pandemic preparedness as a highlight of the summit. Then on Friday, Friday the 15th of September would have a one day plenary on genomics capacity building with a focus on Africa. But the approach will be global, But bring it forward. Will How does the capacity work for pandemic? Sorry for genomics and has been led by global industry in terms of Illumina and it's been led again by data experts, and that really looks at a future for genomics capacity building in Africa, without which we are going to be or Africa is going to be extremely hampered in the development of medicine and related therapies.

00;31;09;04 - 00;31;37;12

So there are three of the sessions. We also have the Obama Foundation having a meeting on the on the 17th of September. We're going to bring philanthropic organizations together, are for lunch on the 15th. We are going to have a number of sessions around the Amazon with the Brazilian Fapesp, the Rio National Research Agency, and they'll be looking at the future of Amazon from the perspective of collaborative research and development and science.

00;31;37;15 - 00;32;06;00

We will be working with a number of legal experts with the law firm Ropes and Gray, who will bring together experts to identify scenarios for an enabling regulatory environment for genomics that's going to take place on the afternoon of the 16th. We are going to have a number of focus days. The government of of government of Ethiopia will be joining us and they'll be presenting how the Ethiopian government presents or approaches the SDGs.

00;32;06;00 - 00;32;27;18

From the point of view of enabling science. We have a similar approach from the government of Ghana. We will have the nice people from Mongolia, the government of Mongolia. They will be presenting a regional approach from the roof of the world, and we would have the same from Nepal, from India, from Japan, from Brazil and many other nations.

00;32;27;23 - 00;32;58;22

And that national approach is very, very important because again, we want to highlight the need for synergies, highlight the similarity between national approaches and then how they can be brought together and benefit from one another. We will also have a presentation from the editor of Nature, Magdalena Skipper at They'll be presenting a what they call a storytelling evening, and that's that's designed to inform and show how science careers evolve.

00;32;58;28 - 00;33;27;05

So so the community can get an understanding of of how that has worked in a number of individuals so very much at look at looking forward to that. I think that personal aspect is is very, very important. And we will be having a number of sessions with with investors how they are approaching investing in science and technology, how that investment can be better aligned between governments, industry, not for profits, philanthropy.

00;33;27;05 - 00;33;50;18

And we're feeling we're seeing that a lot of these organizations have similar objectives. So there's enormous potential to see how they can be more aligned, work together for common objectives and thereby increase possible benefits and outputs. So very much look forward to dose those discussions. In terms of our principal outputs, what we want to do really is three levels.

00;33;50;18 - 00;34;12;01

First is we want to increase participation and collaboration. So we want to bring people together. And one of the main outputs of the science summit last year, researchers discovered each other. They went away and they started collaborating. That wouldn't have happened if they hadn't met at the science. So that's one level. Second level is what our agenda is.

00;34;12;04 - 00;34;44;27

So the United Nations will convene the summit of the future in 2024. So the question we're asking everybody is what should the science agenda for that meeting look like? And we want to compile it. And with the 400 odd sessions we're running, we want to work with them and see how can they contribute to that, What priorities can they put forward and how do they look in terms of a specific objective which the United Nations can support in terms of energy attainment or the post SDG agenda?

00;34;44;29 - 00;35;22;06

And the third element we want to advance is better policy making, make better policies. We will have tennis knocked and Dennis is the chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Science Committee. The Inter-Parliamentary Union is a global organization and represents 138 parliaments around the world. This dialog is hugely, hugely important. So we're going to be working with Denis to see how his members so those legislators in those 140 odd countries can incorporate better global ideas into policymaking at a local level.

00;35;22;06 - 00;35;52;29

And I'm talking about I'm talking about Nepal, I'm talking about Ghana, I'm talking about Kenya, I'm talking about many, many countries. And then what we what we hope that that will achieve is real sustained change. And as we move towards the end of this decade, that's going to be hugely, hugely demanding. But I think if we build this global momentum and we drive this cooperation and instill a sense of cooperation among scientists globally, and also we say that, you know, scientists in fact, are policy policymakers.

00;35;52;29 - 00;36;10;12

I don't see this divide between policymakers and scientists. I think scientists have a huge amount to contribute to policymaking. So, in fact, they're the policymakers. They know a lot about health, They know a lot about what policies are needed to deliver better health. And we want to give them a voice. Well, as I mentioned, Oracle will be speaking and participating at the summit.

00;36;10;12 - 00;36;37;01

And you touched on it a little bit. But when you think about the role for industry players, especially technology giants like Oracle and what's needed to pursue the SDGs, we've talked on the show a good bit about the concept of open science and increasing access to scientific data. It feels like big advances in global health can't happen if those developing or lower middle income countries are kept at arm's length from data.

00;36;37;04 - 00;37;00;02

Absolutely, Mike. Absolutely. Very, very well said. And as I've outlined, is that one of the main impediments potentially to this is regulation by advanced nations, which impacts on less developed nations. So I think an industry has a huge role to play in that because, you know, industry and providing the wherewithal to to advance this data exchange. So we very much look to industry leadership.

00;37;00;02 - 00;37;16;20

And I think Oracle is going to be very instrumental there in showing and leading the way in terms of how data is enabled and how data systems can allow access to data use of data, and of course the use of data for machine learning. And I think that's something we need to learn a lot about, particularly in developing nations.

00;37;16;23 - 00;37;35;25

I also think that the United Nations Global Sustainability Report, the latest version of which is available in draft, and I think the final version will be published at the end of this month. Points to a huge role for for industry. My own view is that I think industry need to be much more at the table at this U.N. table.

00;37;35;25 - 00;37;56;24

I'm delighted to see that Oracle is joining us in this quest, because I think we need to build a narrative and I think it'll be for industry are going to be a very credible partner in terms of telling governments what is necessary, what's needed in terms of creating the space for data to do what data needs. And again, in particular in the countries that are going to be challenged in their quest for access to data.

00;37;56;27 - 00;38;33;03

And that presumes that they have the capacity to have the infrastructure. Many don't, but they're going to need to have that and the industry going to be critical in delivering that. And I think that's that's terribly, terribly clear. So that role for industry in delivering, I think, spans the optimization of policy, the optimization of regulation, the deployment of technology, the maintenance and sustainability of that technology, and of course for the advancement of that technology into different areas in its application, particularly in ICT application, in the areas health and energy and the environment, biodiversity, climate and so forth.

00;38;33;06 - 00;38;55;25

And I think this is something that provides a gives me a lot of optimism in future. And I think also almost we're looking at a, if you like, a post, arguably a post regulatory model where where technology will allow us to define the the remit of Data Act access. I don't think we're there yet, but I think this is this is possibly in future.

00;38;55;27 - 00;39;16;01

And again, Oracle and the colleagues from Oracle will be engaging in a number of discussions on the regulatory side, on the technical side, on the access to data side that's going to help the communities understand not necessarily the solution, but at least define the questions. I think define the questions. Then we have a much greater opportunity in obtaining the answers.

00;39;16;03 - 00;39;39;17

Well, also in my intro, I mentioned that you are founder and managing director of ISC Intelligence and Science. Tell us about that endeavor. What does that do? Well, that that mainly is devoted towards building body types, capacity and advising governments on science. Capacity Building that many faces is based around scientific infrastructures. And of course they come in in many, many flavors.

00;39;39;22 - 00;39;59;29

But ours really is around the design of research infrastructures that that tends to be quite a long, competitive, drawn out, complicated process. Of course, for any funding, there is a there is a competitive process. This takes a a number a number of years, very often for an award, then a subsequent number of years for a design phase to be completed.

00;40;00;05 - 00;40;21;02

Before then you move into construction and operation. Our primary focus is on the design phase and we've done that in in Africa. We do it in India, in in North America, Latin America. And one of our main reasons for focusing on this area is because it means the capacity is there to to allow science to do what it does.

00;40;21;02 - 00;40;46;01

I've mentioned the case of the SKA and in Africa there are many others. But I would say hitherto there's been a lot of differentiation between science capacity. And of course this is this is quite understandable. But I think increasingly in future that capacity will be effectively one big data machine. It won't matter what flavor of science you're doing, you're going to be dipping into a common data reserves.

00;40;46;01 - 00;41;23;05

Now, there's some caveats around that, such as a a synchrotron, for example, or a light source. I think these are, as you can imagine, specific unique instruments. But we're looking forward very much to have the director of the Office of Science in the United States, Dr. Esmond Barrett, talk to us about how this can work on a global level and what are the challenges and how the US experience in building these science infrastructures and capacities can then help many, many other countries to to advance towards not net, not necessary do the same, but at least be on a path to access such capacity.

00;41;23;05 - 00;41;52;08

So ESI has been very, very involved in that and also involved in the regulatory aspects of the impact of updated regulation on science is something we're very exercised about. If we feel that the scientific community historically, by which I mean maybe over the last 15 years have been very slow to understand the implications of regulation of science, but equally the regulatory bodies at national level, equally have been very slow to understand the impacts of science because their primary concerns are not science.

00;41;52;13 - 00;42;23;27

The primary concerns are as they see them is the protection of individual data, etc., etc., etc. and that's very worthy and noble. But then once you pull the thread, you see that that has aspects and implications for scientific endeavor. So we're working in that interface, ensuring or trying to ensure or trying to increase respective awareness and visibility. And now this is has a very sharp focus in the advent of a EIA, the Artificial Intelligence Act in the European Union, which will be defining for reasons we mentioned earlier.

00;42;23;27 - 00;42;43;12

Also, we are very active in that space and we're very particularly active and, and how this seen, how this impacts on less developed nations. Well, Declan, again, we appreciate you being on the show today. If people wanted to learn more about the science Summit or ISC intelligence and science, how can they do that? Main ways. The website for the Science Summit is Science Summit.

00;42;43;15 - 00;45;13;24

It is sciencesummitunga.com the company website is ISC intelligence dot com and then you'll find the usual links to Twitter and all the rest there. Very good. We've got it. And if you listen are are interested in how Oracle can simplify and accelerate your own scientific research. Just take a look at Oracle dot com slash research and see what you think and of course join us again next time for research and action.

How do you connect the needs of researchers to the capabilities of technology? What are the main stages of research and the challenges faced at each stage? And will AI and machine learning speed up research and get solutions to market faster? We will learn those answers and more in this episode with Dr. Mark Hoffman, the Chief Research Information officer for Children’s Mercy and the Children’s Mercy Research Institute, a position he has held since 2016. Dr. Hoffman earned his doctorate in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He later joined Cerner as a software engineer where he advanced to the role of Vice President for Genomics and Research. Dr. Hoffman was also part of the faculty at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) in the Departments of Biomedical and Health Informatics and Pediatrics. His formal training in research and experience in software development has prepared him to connect the needs of researchers to the capabilities of technology. His work is focused on identifying the best capabilities possible to meet rapidly changing requirements in genomics, public health, and big data. Dr. Hoffman is an inventor of 22 issued patents, a member of the American Academy of Inventors, a TED talk alumnus, and an award-winning healthcare product developer. You can learn more about Dr. Hoffman and Children’s Mercy here: https://www.childrensmercy.org Learn more about Oracle for Researcher here: http://www.oracle.com/research

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Episode Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;26;02

What are the three main stages of research and the challenges each are facing? How are researchers handling the new federal policies around data sharing? And will AI and machine learning speed research and get solutions to market faster? We'll get those answers and more on this episode of Research in Action. Hello and welcome back to Research in Action, brought to you by Oracle for Research.

00;00;26;02 - 00;00;49;21

I'm Mike Stiles. And today our guest is Dr. Mark Hoffman, who is the Chief Research Information Officer for Children's Mercy and the Children's Mercy Research Institute. That's a position he's held since 2016. Dr. Hoffman earned his doctorate in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and later joined Cerner as a software engineer, where he went on to be Vice President for genomics and research.

00;00;49;24 - 00;01;17;11

Dr. Hoffman was also part of the faculty at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the Departments of Biomedical and Health Informatics and Pediatrics. Now, because he's had formal training and research and real-world experience in software development, he's kind of uniquely qualified to talk about what researchers need when it comes to technology. His work focuses on identifying the best capabilities to meet requirements in genomics, public health and big data that are always changing.

00;01;17;14 - 00;01;38;22

He's an inventor of 95 issued patents, a member of the American Academy of Inventors, a TED Talk alumnus, and an award-winning health care product developer. And honest to gosh, that's about the shortest intro I could come up with for someone who is so accomplished. So, we're glad you are with us today, Dr. Hoffman. Well, thanks, Mike. I look forward to talking with you.

00;01;38;24 - 00;02;05;06

Our audience is going to be particularly lucky that they decided to stream this episode because there's a lot to cover. But first of all, what got you into research to begin with? Kind of what led you to each step along the way to where you are now at Children's Mercy? Well, it's a long story, but, you know, I think as a kid, I was always curious and I enjoyed Legos and, you know, taking things apart.

00;02;05;06 - 00;02;36;00

And so, in hindsight, I see all the foundations. And that took me a while to realize that my interests are really split between doing science and building technologies. And so, I see myself as very fortunate to have a role that lets me keep one foot in each of those areas of interest. So, you went when you made the decision to go to Cerner and go into that software development world.

00;02;36;02 - 00;03;05;24

What inspired you to do that? It's interesting. When I was in graduate school studying bacteriology, I was funded by an NIH program that if you're in the life sciences, you were required to take coursework outside the life sciences. I chose to do that in computer science. And then the other requirement was you were required to do an industry internship one summer.

00;03;05;26 - 00;03;31;27

Most of my peers chose to do that in pharma. I chose instead to do my internship at a software development company that does bioinformatics software development. Realized how much I liked that type of work and building things that get used in the real world. It's funny, but to this day, some of the features that I developed are still part of their application suite.

00;03;31;27 - 00;04;04;27

So, I learned from that that I enjoy the software and technology and development process. When there was the opportunity to join Cerner as a software engineer. I jumped at it and happened to be in their microbiology product line, so I was able to talk with the clients about what they were struggling with in the lab, understand that, and then translate that into whatever changes were needed in the software.

00;04;05;00 - 00;04;26;28

Did you expect that to be the case that you would be able to keep a foot in both sides on both the technology and the research side? Or was that something like you never thought that could happen? I didn't plan it this way, but I feel very fortunate that I'm able to exercise so many of my different interests.

00;04;27;00 - 00;05;12;19

So obviously children's mercy benefits from your professional expertise, but behind that you've got a real personal commitment and passion for the work that you're doing that kind of increases your value even more. If you're willing, tell us about that personal connection. And just in general, both Cerner and Children's Mercy are based in Kansas City. And as a parent, while I was working at Cerner, over time, both of our children have needed inpatient care at Children's Mercy Hospital and just the compassion and caring and quality of care and the creativity that we often saw with some of our children's physicians.

00;05;12;22 - 00;05;55;21

The willingness to keep trying things until they could help our kids work through their different health concerns has made a huge impression on me. Now, when I walk through the hospital and see parents with their kids who are going through really some of the most difficult situations you can imagine, I try to take a moment and share a smile or, you know, hold the elevator for a parent. I'm just trying to even though I'm not involved in patient care, I just really am empathetic to those families and see that as really kind of my connection to purpose.

00;05;55;24 - 00;06;35;13

What are the unique differences between a children's centered health care provider like that and, say, a regular adult hospital? What are the biggest differences that the staff has to operate with? I think probably the key difference is with adult medicine, you're really working primarily with the patient and they're making their own decisions. In pediatrics, you're working with children and they're their care providers so that there's more voices involved, you know, with younger children.

00;06;35;14 - 00;07;08;04

It's really is the care providers who are making those decisions with teenagers and adolescents, they certainly will have their own voice into the decision making. So that's really a key difference in pediatrics. I think pediatric medicine is interesting because it's both very cautious but also very willing to innovate. And I find that often to be a really interesting dynamic.

00;07;08;06 - 00;07;33;07

So you were a fan, as it were, of Children's Mercy before you started working there? Absolutely. That was a big part of my decision-making process to come here. So how did that come about that you started working for Children's Mercy? And what exactly do you do there? So, I made the difficult decision to move forward in my career in 2013.

00;07;33;09 - 00;07;58;04

The step that I took was to join the University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Medicine, join the faculty there and form what we called the Center of Health Insights. Through those negotiations, Children's Mercy funded 25% of my role at the university. And so, I already had not quite one foot, but at least a few toes in the door.

00;07;58;06 - 00;08;26;19

And I spent a lot of time building relationships with Children's Mercy. About three years into that, there was some hiring of senior leadership for the Research Institute, and I was involved in that and made the case that I'm seeing other organizations create the Chief Research Information Officer role. That idea stuck and I was hired as our first chief Research Information Officer.

00;08;26;21 - 00;08;50;09

So it sounds like what you want, what you're kind of your North star is to make sure researchers at Children's Mercy can tap into the best technical resources and experts out there, because especially medical researchers, everyone expects them to find answers quickly. You know, there are waiting to be helped. So. What's a typical day like for a chief research information officer?

00;08;50;12 - 00;09;27;09

I tell everybody there really is no typical day. Sometimes I'm down in the weeds talking through technical issues and then in the next meeting can be talking with organizational ownership about high level strategy. Part of what I enjoy is the variety in my role. I don't support any single clinical area of research. So, one meeting just yesterday was with our neurology department, where we're doing research into telemedicine and that can support rural communities where children have epilepsy.

00;09;27;11 - 00;09;55;25

And so there was that meeting and then there was another meeting within the same 24 hours about long read genomic sequencing with our genome center. So just context shifting and you know, always with the theme though, of trying to find ways for technology to be an enabler. All too often my peers in research feel that technology sometimes creates a barrier.

00;09;55;25 - 00;10;25;08

And so, one of my goals is just to try to reduce the barriers and increase the opportunities. And for you, it seems like, you know, you actually see the faces of the people that this research is trying to help. Does that add yet another motivational personal element behind kind of your mission there? Absolutely. I think through the pandemic, the entire work model for people in technology in particular has changed.

00;10;25;10 - 00;10;55;26

I know many of us spent a long time working from home and when I was able to start coming back on site, I just find it very motivating to go to the hospital cafeteria or, you know, get out of my research and technology bubble and be among the patients and families. Well, you've met researchers of every kind all over the world, people just like those who listen to this podcast and you know how they define success and also know what challenges they face.

00;10;55;28 - 00;11;25;06

I'll get to what those are in a second, but let's kind of define research. The stages are basic, translational and clinical. What exactly are those stages and how do you maneuver through those to get to actual innovation? I look at those where I see basic research as working with either molecules, cells or even animal models to understand the biological process.

00;11;25;09 - 00;11;57;14

And then the first level of translational research is taking a subset of those basic findings and exploring whether they may have a role to play in clinical practice. So sometimes that can also be where things start to be defined in an animal model. And then you start when something looks promising, you start working through early-stage clinical trials for safety, and then you start working with patient populations.

00;11;57;17 - 00;12;32;08

And then ultimately, if something's successful and does seem to benefit patients, then it gets rolled into practice and then there's an additional layer that we call outcomes research, where periodically it's important to review whether, you know, those new interventions or new tests really are making a positive difference in patient outcomes. That's kind of how I like to conceptualize the different phases of both basic and translational research.

00;12;32;10 - 00;13;06;17

Well, I'm assuming the challenges and opportunities are different depending on what kind of research we're talking about. So, let's start with your world of clinical research. What makes life unnecessarily harder for clinical researchers and does technology offer any help? I think no matter who I spoke with, recruitment into clinical trials is a continuing challenge. And I do think that data and technology have a helpful role to play in that.

00;13;06;20 - 00;13;37;07

Some of our work, as well as some work within Oracle or Oracle Health, is focused on using large de-identified data sets to evaluate the feasibility of doing research at a particular setting. Do they have enough patients who might meet the inclusion criteria? And so, I do think that data and technology have a role to play in the recruitment challenge.

00;13;37;10 - 00;14;05;23

That's kind of interesting that that recruiting for some of these trials is so difficult. What's the reluctance? You know, people have these conditions, it seems like they would be more than willing to try, you know, something? Why the reluctance? I think there's a number of factors. One is sometimes the designers of a study are maybe overly optimistic about the population.

00;14;05;26 - 00;14;36;01

Sometimes they underestimate the concerns that patients and their families may have. So that's one factor. I think as a scientific community, we need to continue working on how we communicate with the public, especially now, you know, with what I think of as the epidemic of mis- and dis-information. Those may not be preventing people from joining studies, but certainly they impact the willingness to utilize the benefits of research.

00;14;36;04 - 00;15;19;10

Yeah. Do you worry about the level of trust declining in health care researchers? I mean, the pandemic probably we took a hit with that. It's you know, that's a really interesting topic because on the one hand, I often reflect on the pandemic and if it had been ten years ago how different and much worse it would have been, because it really would have been unheard of to have in lab diagnostic tests within weeks, at home, testing within months, and a functional and safe vaccine within a year.

00;15;19;12 - 00;16;16;09

Ten years ago, that would not have been possible. And that's exclusively because of our capacity and in doing clinical research. I think, though, there's a lot of challenging dynamics in play that as a scientific community, we just need to keep getting out into the public, explaining in accessible terms what research is about and why it matters. One thing that we're very intentional about here at Children's Mercy is we have both parent and youth advisory boards, and so we work with them closely as we develop new research initiatives so that they're at the table and they're also out in the community, in the community, sharing the work that's happening here, because that's in so many ways

00;16;16;09 - 00;16;44;18

far more effective to hear from your neighbors, your friends at work than it is to hear from, you know, those of us who are doing the technical work. Well, kind of same question for those at the basic or fundamental research level, what are their biggest headaches? And, you know, is technology being applied to those headaches? Yeah, I think I wouldn't necessarily call them so much headaches.

00;16;44;18 - 00;17;21;07

But, you know, all categories of research, of course, feel that funding is always a challenge. I think for basic research, the volume of data that many techniques, not all, but many generate, creates an exciting opportunity for people who work in data science. For example, genomic sequencing, you know, is highly automated now, but the volume of data that any one genomic evaluation can generate is massive as well as, you know, very complex.

00;17;21;07 - 00;17;48;14

And so, the informatics and data science opportunities to analyze these growing volume of data is really exciting. Yeah, it feels like even though there are different research stages, there's obviously overlap when it comes to some of the roadblocks and opportunities to knock those roadblocks down. I mean, what do you see as kind of the shared pain points? You mentioned funding, I guess that goes across all stages.

00;17;48;17 - 00;18;27;09

Yeah, I think especially in a clinical setting there, there's a very high focus on cybersecurity. So, the research community is not always as involved in that as they probably needed to be. So, you know, we even have a lot of considerations that we incorporate into making sure that our systems, our data are secure to the highest standards. So that also my team tries to insulate the researchers from that type of work because we want them to be focused on doing science.

00;18;27;09 - 00;18;53;28

And in many organizations, we see researchers who have to get their hands in some of these other processes and technology issues. So a key part of what I see as my role and my team's role is insulating the researchers from those types of concerns. Yeah, which I'm sure they greatly appreciate. Obviously, there is a lot of compute resources that are required.

00;18;54;00 - 00;19;28;24

So, I imagine one of your challenges is to make sure these folks have the kind of compute resources they need. Yeah, and that's really an exciting area. We have recently completed the migration for our Genome Center of their bioinformatics pipeline from an on-premise data center to a completely cloud-based system. And we're excited that we're starting to see that gain of efficiencies from that, you know, moving that to a complete cloud model.

00;19;28;24 - 00;20;01;12

We have other projects that are more of a hybrid model. We do have a data center and our new research institute building. So, I'm excited about the new world where we can really offer computational and storage resources at a totally different scale than was needed ten years ago or even five years ago. Well, I know you're part of the Oracle Research Industry Strategy Council, a group that talked about a lot of the same stuff, pretty recently.

00;20;01;12 - 00;20;24;14

Just this May actually. So, one of the topics of discussion was how some researchers who are federally funded are kind of I don't know if struggling is the right word, but dealing with new policies around data storage and data sharing. The NIH has gotten real serious about those policies earlier this year. Why are these policies like FAIR principles coming down now?

00;20;24;17 - 00;20;56;13

And how ready are researchers to cope with those new protocols? Plus, whatever else may pop up in terms of regulation? Yeah, I think the change in policy reflects a realization on the funders that, you know, despite the expectation that researchers would share all of most of their data that was generated with those taxpayer funds, that that wasn't happening at the consistency level that they expected.

00;20;56;14 - 00;21;33;02

So, the major change this year is that that expectation is articulated much more forcefully. And so now anybody doing federally funded research is expected to make any data that does not include protected health information available to the community. I think some researchers are already doing that. So again, in the genomics world, that's already a fairly common practice. But in other areas it will require some change and different ways of thinking.

00;21;33;04 - 00;22;06;12

I'm not seeing a high level of anxiety or concern about it. I think it's something that we can work through. It's a matter of right sizing the solution. So, we don't want to oversize how we accommodate the new regulations, but we want to make sure that all of our researchers are equipped to be compliant. The reluctance that there is to data sharing is that just concerns about proprietary stuff or researchers are thinking about going to market with this.

00;22;06;12 - 00;22;31;02

And, you know, they want to keep it close to the vest. Sometimes that's the case. I think sometimes it's also academic competitive concerns. So, if you're competing for grant funding with the same people who could download your data, are you giving you know, there's concern that you're giving them, if not a head start, at least the capacity to catch up faster than they otherwise would have.

00;22;31;04 - 00;23;05;04

Does technology help in any way to adhere to these new policies and facilitate that kind of data sharing? I definitely believe it can. There's a variety of portals that can enable researchers to share their data. I think many of these have features that researchers like so that you can track how often your data assets are downloaded. In some cases, you can get a sense for, you know, where are the downloads originating.

00;23;05;07 - 00;23;39;10

What I think will be interesting over the next few years. Right now, in academia, tenure decisions are made based on publications and how often your papers are cited and so forth. I think if we can see a movement towards rewarding, how often is your data downloaded and accessed and utilized and rewarding, you know, academics that do that. I think that will be a real important factor in changing the culture around that.

00;23;39;12 - 00;24;04;28

So, in a couple of past episodes, I actually did ask our guests about this concept of open science that's grounded in FAIR principles. From what I've learned, open science doesn't mean, you know, anything goes, everybody dive in. It's all chaos. There is still scientific rigor. What does open science mean to you? What's open about it and what's still closed about it?

00;24;05;00 - 00;24;48;24

I think data sharing is a key part of open science, you know, and this is where having one foot in technology and one foot in science is helpful because if you look at the open-source software movement, there was very similar cultural resistance to that. But then as people realized that if you put your software code out for the public and they find and fix bugs in that code, that similar process can start to occur with scientific data where maybe there is an inconsistency or maybe there's a pattern in the data that you didn't recognize as, but somebody else does.

00;24;48;27 - 00;25;16;08

So, I think there's a lot to be learned from the process that the open-source software world witnessed and experienced. I think certainly in both cases, putting your either your code or your data out there as a vulnerable feeling for a lot of people. So, helping create a comfort level to get past that vulnerability is really important for the success of both.

00;25;16;08 - 00;25;44;21

But I think when you look at the long-term benefits of open science, I personally believe that the quality of work will go up. And when you pull it back to pediatrics, I think some of the very interesting work in pediatrics revolves around rare disease. And so no single organization is likely to have the numbers of patients with these rare diseases that they can independently gain the insights they need to.

00;25;44;21 - 00;26;13;12

So, collaborating and sharing data is essential for so many areas of pediatric research in particular. Well, for all the acronym fans out there, we talk about FAIR principles. That stands for findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability. So yeah, I guess on a scale of 1 to 10, how close do you think we are to being FAIR? It'll vary from place to place, but I would just pull a number out of the air.

00;26;13;12 - 00;26;36;29

On average, I would give us a six or seven. Okay, already. Good. But probably going to get better is how I kind of interpret that answer. Yeah. So, one of the guests I pestered with the open science questions was Amy Dockser Marcus of the Wall Street Journal. She wrote a book called, “We The Scientists: How a Daring Team of Parents and Doctors Forged a New Path for Medicine.”

00;26;37;01 - 00;27;10;13

And basically, it's about patient-scientist-doctor collaborations and how that approach could get us to solutions faster. Do you see these collaborations happening? Are doctors and scientists more open to listening to and including patients and their caregivers? Yeah, I'm really seeing, you know, exciting changes in that. I mentioned earlier that we have patient and parent community advisory groups that are increasingly engaged and active in our research strategy.

00;27;10;16 - 00;27;44;14

And it's really shifting from just sometimes those initiatives start with us just telling those groups about what we're doing. But now it's really shifting to how can we do it better and how can we work through these barriers to recruitment, How can we make sure that we're reaching underserved populations? So, I find this whole engagement model to be a really exciting development, and it's really gaining much needed momentum.

00;27;44;16 - 00;28;12;13

And I find it inspiring and motivating to hear, you know, parents of children who have gone through a very difficult health conditions share their stories because that motivates me as well and motivates my colleagues. So, it really is an exciting development that's really picked up momentum. Well, thinking about the technology part, researchers kind of have to figure out what the appropriate tools are and deal with.

00;28;12;14 - 00;28;30;28

Okay, is this data I need and legacy on premises systems or can I get to it in the cloud? And you touched on this a little bit earlier about how you have a cloud solution, but you still also have some hybrid situations. Are you a hybrid guy or do you think all things in the cloud is the way to go?

00;28;30;28 - 00;29;02;13

Which way do you lean? My approach to everything is what are your requirements? And then I will help you fulfill your requirements. And so increasingly we can fulfill many of those requirements with an exclusively cloud-based model. Where it's interesting is that not only are there functional requirements, but there's cost requirements. And so, the hybrid model can often still be delivered with lower cost than a cloud exclusive model.

00;29;02;15 - 00;29;34;06

So, we're trying to be sensitive to the budgetary constraints of especially some of our early career investigators and offer a hybrid model to them as a way to get started without incurring the sometimes high costs of working in any of the major cloud providers. So, everybody in nearly every field that there is thinking about and talking about AI now and how it could change things dramatically.

00;29;34;08 - 00;29;59;06

What are you thinking about AI and machine learning when it comes to scientific research? Is it all positive and will it speed discovery and solutions getting to market? Or are you also waving the caution flag and trying to manage expectations? Because I think about how the combination of open science and it could get really interesting.

00;29;59;09 - 00;30;33;14

Yeah, I currently take a nuanced and cautious stance on AI and machine learning. If you're using those resources for data analysis, I see a lot of value to them. There's so many as we deal with these rapidly growing large datasets, the capacity of our minds to do the pattern recognition is limited. And so, AI and ML are great at pattern recognition in data.

00;30;33;14 - 00;31;24;04

And so, I think as a tool to support data analysis, I'm very positive. I worry more about the application and clinical practice of AI. I mean, being a member of the Ethical AI Initiative of the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, and I'm very impressed with the approach that they take and they deliver a workshop that is focused on if you're either buying a system that reports to be AI enabled or building something, what are the variety of ethical considerations that you should be considering?

00;31;24;06 - 00;31;55;11

And a particular area of concern is around health equity. And because we know that so many of these systems are trained on data sets that are skewed towards non-diverse populations. So, if that's what you're training these models with, and they will reinforce the inequities in health care. So, I think for some of those larger scale applications, we need to have a deliberate, careful and intentional approach.

00;31;55;13 - 00;32;22;24

It's not to say that there won't be positive uses of AI and ML, but I do think as we get closer to patient facing application, we need to be more intentional and more deliberate. Well, I want to be in a really good mood for the rest of the day, so could you tell us about research that's going on right now at Children's Mercy and some things that you're particularly excited about?

00;32;22;27 - 00;32;59;02

Yeah, and again, as I mentioned earlier, I really enjoy and thrive on the variety of work here. So I'm fortunate to collaborate, for example, with Dr. Bridgette Jones, who does research on health disparity and asthma. I'm fortunate to work with our Genome Center for Genomic Medicine, where they have a very large community facing project called Genomic Answers for Kids and focused on identifying the genetic basis for rare diseases.

00;32;59;05 - 00;33;28;23

I'm fortunate to collaborate with a wide group of experts on some of my own research where we use large de-identified clinical data from Oracle Health. So, two recent things we evaluated were how often and this is at a national level, are youth and young adults who present in the emergency room with a migraine, how often are they treated with an opioid?

00;33;28;25 - 00;33;59;29

The ideal would be 0 to 2%. We noticed that more than 20% of those youth and young adults nationally are treated with an opioid. So that type of research can then lend to process changes that challenge providers to reflect on their ordering patterns. So, the variety of really exciting research that we do at Children's Mercy is just something that excites me a lot.

00;34;00;03 - 00;34;32;15

Yeah, and on the genomics side, how close are we to, you know, all the exciting articles we read about the entire genome being mapped to the extent that we can go on and find the marker that is causing this rare disease and switch it off. Well, the very last part is where things get hard. But we've made huge strides in the recognition of the genetic basis for different rare health conditions.

00;34;32;18 - 00;35;09;01

Sometimes just finding that can lead to the realization that it's similar to a condition that presents differently but has a treatment available. And then you can try that medication on the patient with that genetic variant. And so those are the initial successes. I think the gene therapy type interventions that you might be alluding to, they're starting to regain some momentum, but that's going to be a long process.

00;35;09;04 - 00;35;42;17

So do you think people like me who just ask the question that I asked have over or heightened expectations? It's like, what is that balance between where the public thinks we should be and where actual research really is? Yeah, I think and that gets back to the even some of the societal topics that we were touching on earlier, where on the one hand there's elements of society that want research to move faster and to do more.

00;35;42;19 - 00;36;19;15

And then there's other elements that are much more of the go slow. And so, again, as a scientific community, finding that right balance and how we communicate about our work is really critical. And it's something that we really need to put an increased focus on to, you know, on the one hand, make sure that the advances that are complete and ready are utilized, which, you know, we all want that and that the emerging advances that people are participating in studies that they know that it is safe to participate in studies.

00;36;19;17 - 00;36;46;16

And then when the results of those studies are completed, that they're comfortable utilizing the output of that research. Well, for the last question, we'll stick with that societal aspect. You are an Oracle Council member, so you already know this, but Oracle believes that for the good of global health and humanity, we must understand and serve the needs of research and researchers at every level.

00;36;46;18 - 00;37;13;10

And it feels like we're facing bigger things like food security, disease prevention. Nobody needs another pandemic. What's your view on how research is only going to get more vital? And the pressure on research is only going to go up for kind of holding the earth and the species together? Yeah, that's a great question. And I am an optimist about research.

00;37;13;10 - 00;37;47;13

I believe that the work we do in research matters to the public and to the world. The examples you gave of food security, climate change, pandemics are all the, you know, major emerging concerns that all types of research are going to play a role in the solutions to those problems. And then I would pull us back to the question of how different would things have been if the pandemic had been ten years ago.

00;37;47;13 - 00;38;23;03

And to me, the research into many vaccines and rapid molecular diagnostics, those are all things that made the response to the pandemic. What it was, again, far from perfect, but much more effective than it would have been ten years ago were it not for all of the research that supported those developments. And I think that same mindset would apply to the other large scale problems and challenges that you mentioned.

00;38;23;05 - 00;38;44;00

Dr. Hoffman, thank you again for joining us today. You know, a lot of times our listeners will want to learn more about what you talked about or even get in touch with you. Is there any way they can do that? Sure. I'm on Twitter at Mark Hoffman K.C. I'm also on LinkedIn and my bio is available on the Children's Mercy website.

00;38;44;03 - 00;40;56;11

Great. We appreciate that. If you are interested in how Oracle can simplify and accelerate your research, you can check out Oracle dot com slash research. And join us next time on Research in Action.

How can researchers who have developed innovative solutions begin to commercialize? What makes a great research-entrepreneur? And how are universities and organizations helping to bridge the research-to-commercialization gap? We will learn those answers and more in this episode with Laure Haak. A neuroscientist by training, Laure has a BS and MS in Biology and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University, and she did postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health. Her career includes diverse experiences: serving as founding Executive Director of ORCID; leadership roles at Thomson Reuters, The US National Academies, and Science Magazine. She is currently founder and CEO of Mighty Red Barn, a consultancy that supports impact-based organizations building digital infrastructure, and helping research innovators go from discovery to startup. Laure carries on this work as a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute, and Board Chair of Phoenix Bioinformatics and the Green Bay Chapter of SCORE.

You can learn more about Laure and Mighty Red Barn here: https://www.mightyredbarn.com

Learn more about Oracle for Research: http://www.oracle.com/research 

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Episode Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;26;12

How can researchers who have developed innovative products begin to commercialize them? Why are digital persistent identifiers important to researchers? And who are some of the partners that can help researchers get their products to market? We'll get those answers and more on this episode of Research and Action. Hello again. Welcome back to Research in Action, brought to you by Oracle for Research.

00;00;26;12 - 00;00;47;27

I'm Mike Stiles. And our guest today is Laure Haak. Laure is a neuroscientist by training. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford. And she did her postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health. She's done a lot over the course of her career, including serving as founding executive director of ORCID leadership roles at Thomson Reuters,

00;00;48;00 - 00;01;14;09

the U.S. National Academies, and Science magazine. She's currently founder and CEO of Mighty Red Barn. That's a consultancy that supports impact-based organizations that are trying to build their digital infrastructure. And it also helps research innovators like many of our listeners, get from discovery to startup. Laure carries on this work as a research scholar at the Ronin Institute and Board chair of Phoenix Bioinformatics and the Green Bay chapter of SCORE.

00;01;14;09 - 00;01;38;01

Laure you're obviously a very busy person, so I'm really glad you're on the show. Well, thank you for the invitation. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Us as well. So we're going to talk about innovation to commercialization, because we do have listeners who are researchers and PhDs. They've got the research discovery part down. But starting and leading a startup, that's a whole different thing.

00;01;38;02 - 00;02;02;28

But before we do that, what did you want to be when you grew up and what motivated you at each step from Stanford, to ORCID, to Mighty Red Barn? Yeah. And so, I think whenever people ask about careers, it kind of depends on what you had for breakfast, how you answer the question. So, I think the best way to explain my career is that I never grew out of the childhood fascination with how things work.

00;02;02;28 - 00;02;24;19

I never stopped asking why, which has it's endearing and annoying qualities, depending again on what you had for breakfast. I was and still am fascinated with how the brain works. And after college I started graduate school in neuroscience during what was then the decade of the brain. It was a big deal. So I studied hibernation. I studied sleep wake cycles.

00;02;24;19 - 00;02;51;12

I studied how our bodies internal clock responds to light. I was also at the same time involved in the Association for Women in Science as well as Women in Neuroscience, where I managed a quarterly or a quarterly newsletter back in the day when you actually mailed things using stamps in the Postal Service. You know, we couldn’t look at how many people opened, but we had a list of about a thousand people were sending out to.

00;02;51;15 - 00;03;21;14

So during my tenure as president of Women in Neuroscience, that particular group was folded into the Society of Neuroscience. And it is still an active initiative today, which is really awesome to see. So from my postdoc with that portfolio of three years of these newsletters, I joined the Next Wave team at Science Magazine and triple-A US, which is now called Science Careers, and I worked on post-doc policy and career development for science graduate students.

00;03;21;14 - 00;03;39;15

And there's so many really smart people that are so focused on their research, they couldn't see the vast opportunities for applying their passion and skills. I think this gets back to your question, Mike, about, look, there's folks that do research, but how can I be an entrepreneur and start something? And part of it is kind of looking up.

00;03;39;18 - 00;04;04;07

So when I was at the Next Wave team, I helped to support the founding of the National Postdoc Association and then went on to be a study director at the National Academies and working with esteemed scientists to research and produce reports on research workforce issues, including interdisciplinary research, international students. And on the last report I did when I was there was on women in academia.

00;04;04;10 - 00;04;28;15

So from the academies I again moved to something completely different and a tech startup where when I started there was no job description and no job title. It sounds like a tech startup. Yes, but you have to really you know, I came out of academics in that I went to two places where there is a lot of structure, right?

00;04;28;17 - 00;04;53;26

So the tech startup was like, okay. And I was also the only peer there. So I crafted my job and my job title and became the chief science officer. And I help the company build an analytics consultancy that brought the data that they were kind of collecting and munching together to these pressing research policy issues where, you know, you could kind of look at some amount of data.

00;04;53;26 - 00;05;15;07

We didn't have, you know, a lot of it that we needed to really answer these pressing issues. So this was this time was right as compute power was really starting to take off. So I have to admit, during graduate school, we had a computer that took up the size of a room. We had an old one of those things.

00;05;15;09 - 00;05;35;29

And so now a few years later, you can now crunch terabytes of data in hours rather than weeks. And I know these days you can do petabytes in microseconds. But, you know, we're getting there in the machine, sit on a desktop, Right. So this is like this wonderful period of time when people are like, oh, my gosh, what can we do?

00;05;36;01 - 00;05;55;01

And one of the wonderful things we did was work with the National Institutes of Health on a number of program evaluation projects. We had data on grants, we had data on papers, we data on people, we had data on patents. We brought all that together to help the NIH understand what is the impact of their funding in certain portfolio areas.

00;05;55;03 - 00;06;30;27

One of the projects we did was with the NIH leadership, and it was to examine what was thought to be potential bias in the awarding of research grants, a hot button topic and lots of anecdotes. So we were able to bring to bear the compute power and the data that we had to a study which led to a publication of a paper in Science magazine demonstrating a substantial gap in the likelihood of award for black NIH grant applicants, other measures being equal that spurred the NIH to examine their review process.

00;06;30;27 - 00;06;53;26

I'm really, really proud of this work, and I'm proud that the NIH took action, both partnered with us on the work and took action to try to remedy or at least further study and remedy the situation. So some of the stuff I've done, so at the same time all this was happening, startups, right, like to go through and sell and, you know, get money for the investment they've made.

00;06;53;26 - 00;07;24;26

So I was actually part of the startup's management team that was pitching for our acquisition and we were eventually purchased by Thomson Reuters. And overnight we went from a team of about 50 people to a team of about 50,000 people. It is a really big change and I'm the kind of person that really likes the scrappy energy of startups where you can be super nimble and change your mind and oh, maybe we should do this today and started looking for an opportunity to build something new.

00;07;24;26 - 00;07;44;25

So I did the kind of spin in, you know, with the the group. So I did the spin out with the National Post Association. I did the spin in with the evaluation team and analytics team at Discovery Logic, Thomson Reuters. And then it was like, okay, I want to try something else. And this would actually be Let's start a company from the beginning, right?

00;07;44;28 - 00;08;12;29

And I had the phenomenal opportunity to come on board at as ORCID was just starting. And so I became the founding executive director and I was the first staff hire. There was already a board and bylaws and all these other things, but they didn't have any staff. So I became the founding executive director and it was just awesome. I cannot tell you how wonderful that it was, just every day on my hip pinch myself.

00;08;12;29 - 00;08;46;06

I can't believe I have this. Jobs is great. So I helped to. I have to build the operational infrastructure. I built a team and with the team, a globe of community and technology infrastructure for researcher identifiers. So ORCID is essentially a digital name for researchers that connect us with all of our professional activities and contribution. So in eight years we managed to reach financial sustainability is this is a nonprofit and we had over 10 million registered researchers, a thousand members and national consortia in 40 countries.

00;08;46;13 - 00;09;07;28

I was delighted, but it was also time for me to move on because we got where I wanted to get to. It was built and now we had to move into more of a maintenance mode. Then let's build, build, build, right. I was ready for my next build project and I stepped out in 2020 to create Mighty Red Barn, which is, as you said, a consultancy for social impact startups.

00;09;07;28 - 00;09;32;05

So here we are. Well, I'm worried that you're going to go start another company before this podcast is over, but your role at ORCID seems like a pretty big deal when you think about how critical digital persistent identifiers are. Tell me what you're trying to get done at ORCID or what you were working on at ORCID. Why digital identifiers are so important.

00;09;32;08 - 00;09;53;09

Yeah, So I guess the way to explain that is, you know, as you move from print, you know, people going to the library, when I started graduate school, we would go to the library, have a lot of time at the photocopy machine, photocopying stuff from journals. You know, people don't do that anymore. And everyone's looking for stuff on the Internet now.

00;09;53;09 - 00;10;14;06

You can't find things on the Internet unless you have a good key for finding things. Right. And for researchers, anybody with the name notices in my name, I have a fairly unique name, but it's not unique enough to be able to find all of the things that I've done and attach them to me. Even Google still gets me wrong.

00;10;14;06 - 00;10;47;00

I get messages every three weeks saying, Could you please update your record? So what ORCID does is it provides individuals with essentially this digital name, a unique digital persistent identifier that they can use as they're going through their regular workflows. Right. So for example, when you're applying for a grant, when you're registering as a new graduate student, when you're submitting a manuscript or a dataset to a repository, part of that transaction is you including your name and your digital name, your ORCID I.D, as you're going through that workflow process.

00;10;47;06 - 00;11;11;10

So it's not asking you to do any additional work other than basically using ORCID single sign on to go log into these systems, the systems, collect your ID and then attach that ID to the transaction. So now your paper includes your ORCID ID, now your grant includes your ORCID ID, your record at your university, includes your ORCID ID, etc., etc..

00;11;11;10 - 00;11;34;24

So part of that workflow and one of the things I was really, really big on since graduate school was this idea that research outputs are so much more than just journal articles, right? This huge motivation for me, articles are how we talk about the work we do, right? But there's datasets, there's software code, there's instruments made. This committee is mentoring, teaching.

00;11;34;24 - 00;12;05;14

All of these things are integral parts of the research process. So ORCID was not just about, Here's my ORCID IDs. I publish a paper. It was a way to say to the individual, here you have power in determining what to include in your professional body of work. This is your idea. You decide when and where to use it, and you can also decide what is available on your ORCID profile for public view or sharing with trusted parties.

00;12;05;14 - 00;12;34;03

We were all about providing that power and agency to the individual and based on this presupposition, that individual should control what information is shared publicly regarding their digital reputation. And yeah, so I'm I'm proud that ORCID was has been and continues to be part of the story of providing a way for research as an agency over how they are viewed on the Internet and how people can find and see what they've been doing.

00;12;34;06 - 00;12;58;24

Yeah, it sounds like the way an artist would sign their painting, right? Except providing a digital way, a digital recognition of that. Right. And you started to see more artists using digital identifiers at DMS, things like that, to say, this is my work and essentially coded in the back end. So you can't steal or repurpose the art without some recognition or citation of the artist.

00;12;58;24 - 00;13;22;07

That's all of what this is about. Yeah, the applications go way beyond researchers. Yes. Yes. Now, as promised, we need to get these folks from research to commercialization. I've never seen science and research move so fast as it did during the pandemic, and of course, with good reason, we didn't have a lot of time to putz around with red tape and bureaucracy as we had to get a product to the market.

00;13;22;13 - 00;13;46;22

Now it feels like on university campuses around the world, there's a sense of look up our support and resources because we might have to do that again or produce spin outs. What does that framework look like today and what is the level of support? Yeah, and so I think, you know, part of this is how do folks in academics do commercial work, right?

00;13;46;23 - 00;14;14;22

And so I think starting off with how do we talk about ownership? And one of the big differences between academic and commercial research, of course, is intellectual property rights. Who owns the research output shapes how information is shared and how and what can be moved into a product, right? So for me, during COVID, one of the most impressive demonstrations of the power of open collaboration is the National COVID Cohort Collaborative.

00;14;14;22 - 00;14;46;04

Also known as NC three. And I love identifiers. They used open identifiers including ORCID and dyes and organization identifiers to attribute who made what data contribution, which is really awesome. And they also coupled that with this this really strong metadata framework that enabled the combination and the combination of contributed datasets and components of dataset. Talk about awesome. This is not something you could do in one company.

00;14;46;04 - 00;15;33;05

This requires a collaboration across labs and across corporate. This work was instrumental in driving early data sharing during the pandemic, so you couldn't have gotten the product without that data sharing, right? And part of that data sharing happened, at least in part because everyone who contributed data to the collaborative knew they would get credit, even if another group did the analysis and knew that if some missed study that was contributed or some dataset that was contributed was later withdrawn, that that data could be withdrawn from their analysis as well because of the way that persistent identifiers in metadata had been that that framework had been set up at the get go in NC three.

00;15;33;12 - 00;16;00;12

So the group managing the collaborative actually won the inaugural Data Works and Challenge Prize for data sharing earlier this year, and I encourage you to check it out. Is really phenomenal piece of work. And I personally think that's the way we need to start thinking about getting product to market is the step before that which is how do we enable data sharing that allows people to collaborate on these problems?

00;16;00;14 - 00;16;18;28

Yeah, after this, I think you should go work in Hollywood because, you know, you are you see these screenplays that were written by about 11 or 12 people and it's like, okay, who contributed what? Right now that industry kind of has the same problems of people being, you know, the collaborations and what was mine versus what was else's.

00;16;19;01 - 00;16;58;05

Right. But, you know, the world needs solutions. And the younger you are, the more you've gotten used to near instant gratification. We're used to seeing things happen. So have expectations and research shifted as well, or our research institutions moving as fast to commercialization as they can? What's driving that need to commercialize? Yeah, I mean, you've got the by dual act that shifted everything, at least in the US and there's been a strong push ever since then was in the mid-eighties right of where universities set up tech transfer offices and you know have patent attorneys on staff advising people.

00;16;58;05 - 00;17;23;14

There's a number of universities that have spin out incubators, things like that. If I don't think it's getting faster, if anything, I think some universities are realizing there's a huge amount of effort and money that they're putting into these centers that they may not be recouping there. It hasn't been a fast win for many universities in this space, but it's certainly active.

00;17;23;17 - 00;17;49;08

I think, again, coming back to my previous comment, I think in addition to these spin outs and commercialization, where academic IP intellectual property is acquired by a commercial entity, I think what I would love to see is more people considering this collaborative model, right? One in which there is incentive baked in for data sharing by all parties.

00;17;49;08 - 00;18;16;24

Right. And I like to see this civilly. Is it science fiction? Right. We can look at how high energy physics is done, right? There's this large inter-country collaboration at CERN using shared equipment and management. And, you know, researchers can openly access this facility, you know, by applying to work there. And three, this a covered example I just mentioned proved this concept in biomedical sciences.

00;18;16;24 - 00;18;43;18

Right. What I see that similar in both of these models is both the intent to collaborate on big Thorny and of course, expensive like really crushingly. You need to answer the question right now. Problems. There's also the willingness to fund at the highest levels. And I think this might be what is changing a little bit where you see and an agent and a NSF starting to fund these larger collaborative efforts.

00;18;43;18 - 00;19;09;27

I'm really happy to see these things happening. And then also what, NC three and to some extent CERN and others have done is operationalizing attributions using these open and persistent digital identifiers, not just for people, not just for the papers, but for all of the things and the places that are involved in the project so that you can kind of deconstruct and tease apart and understand, Hey, I did this part and I did that part right?

00;19;09;27 - 00;19;35;15

So everyone participating gets credit. Whether you build a detector, develop the methods, collect the samples, perform the analysis, curate the dataset, or even fund the initiative or house the researchers and the equipment. Right? All of that. Everyone understands your different part of it. And I think there is room in this collaborative model for academic and commercial and government entities to work together.

00;19;35;18 - 00;20;02;18

Collaboration. It reduces the upfront development costs for companies, It enables broad talent sharing, which is pretty awesome. It allows, like the postdocs in the academic lab to get some corporate experience working in these collaborations. And it also leverages the strengths of each sector the ideas, the innovation product to market, which most people in academia never think about product to market as well as risk reduction.

00;20;02;18 - 00;20;31;14

Right. Which again, most people in academia are thinking about risk reduction. And I would love to see more research groups looking into these cooperative business structures as an option for bringing products to market. We provide recognition, operational frameworks and I think also really important is this idea of equity for all of the parties involved in this. And you asked for some practical examples and there's actually a co-op accelerator program at START that co-op.

00;20;31;14 - 00;20;52;24

So it's not like you can only get startups through a venture model. You can also get or a venture for profit model. You can also get startups moving through these accelerator programs that are really focused on the co-op structure. So something to look at. If you've met a lot of startup founders, you start to see they have a unique set of talents and drivers.

00;20;52;24 - 00;21;20;16

You know, research entrepreneurs, PhDs may not be like them. That may not come naturally. They've got to learn product market fit, funding strategies, sales, marketing, regulatory compliance, business skills. It's kind of not fair. It's like that, Is it not enough? I'm not a research genius now. I have to be Richard Branson on top of that. Right, Right. So our grad schools, are anyone helping train them to be entrepreneurs or is it assumed they probably don't need to be?

00;21;20;17 - 00;21;42;02

Yeah. And it's funny because, like, our entrepreneurs are actually trained to be entrepreneurs is like, where does that come from? Well, it's almost natural inside me, right? I'm going to say it probably wasn't natural. Looking at any number of things is exposure to certain ideas and concepts and ways of thinking and doing that happen. Right? And so I'm going to tell a story.

00;21;42;02 - 00;22;05;08

I can tell a story here. So back in the day when I was at Science magazine, working on Next Wave, working on postdoc policy, that was when my first kid was born. Okay, fast forward 20 years, several stops later in my career, and I returned to pursue our policy in an early career workforce conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

00;22;05;08 - 00;22;27;04

This is like two years ago. So the very same issues were on the table. And I just like, Oh my God, I feel like I stepped into the Wayback Machine, right? There's perceived poor career prospects by the postdocs. They felt stuck long terms in low paying apprenticeships, no substantive change in the ability to attract and retain diverse talent into science careers.

00;22;27;04 - 00;22;52;28

It was really frustrating even to just sit in the room and listen to the the economist talking about this. I'm like, I can't believe things haven't changed in the last 20 years. This is insane, right? So one of the key skills of researchers is our ability to focus on a problem and give it all we've got. Even if it looks hopeless, we give it all we've got.

00;22;53;04 - 00;23;17;08

And to some degree, that's a parallel skill with entrepreneurs is just like hammer away and make it happen. Right? But it also means it's really hard for us to look up and around and see what else might be good or fun or wise for our career, right? It's even more difficult to do this when the culture of science is driving for speed above all else.

00;23;17;08 - 00;23;39;27

We've got to answer this question right now. Right? Publish or perish. Publishing is so important, right? And because of that, people hold their findings really close for fear. If they're going to be scoops they don't want to share. They're not they're actually disincentivized from sharing. And they're, you know, in their cubbyholes working on their stuff. It's really not a great way to think about how can I be an entrepreneur, right?

00;23;40;04 - 00;24;06;07

So when the structure of science does not prioritize credit for all the people and it doesn't include the necessary components of the research process and what you get credit for collaboration and career development more in your question is not the outcome. So we do need entrepreneurial researchers, whether they spin out a product, run a lab, work in research policy, run a nonprofit.

00;24;06;09 - 00;24;35;06

All of these things are good skills such as team management, data sharing, budgeting, strategy and operations are all essential. And of course, looking at business, these are the same skills. Entrepreneur Sorry, entrepreneurs need to start a business to right? So these you have to have these skills, but it's not what you learn at the university, right? So the big questions are who provides the training and when is this training provided?

00;24;35;06 - 00;24;58;06

And then how? If you have the training, how do you get researchers early career and the supervisor is to prioritize participation in the training. You're supposed to be in the lab. What are you doing outside the lab? How dare you? Right. So one shining light here is the National Institutes of Health launched a program called Best Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training.

00;24;58;06 - 00;25;23;18

And this is one example of a science agency actually providing incentives through a funding program for these training experiences for grad students and postdocs. And I can tell you, I was on the review panel for one of these best sessions, and it was really interesting listening and reading what the universities were trying to do to get people just to come to the training courses that are part of their training program.

00;25;23;18 - 00;25;50;20

As a grad student and a postdoc, it was incredible the amount of resistance that there is in the university setting for having researchers do anything other than their particular experiment. There's a massive cultural challenge there. I mean, it sounds like because you're right, again, the research is doing the research because that's their passion. And it's the old thing of, you know, if I just don't think about this other thing, maybe it'll go away, right?

00;25;50;23 - 00;26;11;20

If I don't think about the fact that there's not a job for me at the end of this, maybe it'll materialize magically. Somewhere in there. Yeah. Okay. So I'm a university dean that could never happen. But just play along with me for a minute. I come to you and I say, Laure, I want to build programs and a culture around turning research into innovative product.

00;26;11;25 - 00;26;34;20

What resources do I need to make available and how do I build a supportive community around that? And I guess that speaks to the challenges of fighting that resistance, you know, getting community to pull people in. Right, Right. And so I think, you know, the other question at universities is anywhere is always cost rate. How much more do I need to invest to create these programs?

00;26;34;20 - 00;26;58;02

I think the great and wonderful answer here is that universities don't really need to invest a whole lot more to create a program. So there's a number of universities. Many, many of them already have something called a small business development centers. These are associated with the Small Business Administration, and they're staffed by business and technical advisors that can help problem solver access capital and help with business planning.

00;26;58;04 - 00;27;20;04

Woo Right. You know, I think anything new, it's already there. And they provide services to people at the university and actually at SCORE are we we collaborate with folks in the SPDC as well and we can send people from the community over to these groups at the university to get the technical assistance they need. That is beyond the scope of what we do in this program.

00;27;20;04 - 00;27;45;13

So I think it's less a matter of the university setting up more resources. It's really more connecting entrepreneurs with the resources that are already in the community. And I mean, frankly, we run into the same challenge with data sharing. There's tons of resources available through the university library, but researchers often have no clue to reach out to the librarian for help with data sharing.

00;27;45;16 - 00;28;18;21

So I think all of us researchers have myopia, but so do research administrators and services like SDB sees and score as well. Right? How do we reach and run the workshops, walk the halls? Right. We have to be really proactive and go out and engage with the researchers, meet them where they're at, and engage with these groups of people about entrepreneurial skills, practices, meeting with mentors, things like that.

00;28;18;21 - 00;28;37;01

So I think all of us need to do better at looking up and out, asking for help, listening. And, you know, it's not just product market fit. It's like the focus groups that we always tell entrepreneurs to do. I think the services that are out there for entrepreneurs also need to do the same thing. I think about biotech and medical research entrepreneurs.

00;28;37;01 - 00;29;09;15

They've got like an extra bucket of problems because they have to work with the health care industry. Highly regulated, very complicated, not big risk takers when where innovation is concerned, can the sharing of data be a difference maker in all that? What data should the researcher bring to the table and how to smooth process? Yeah, so there are two wonderful sets of guidelines that are out there and people are working on implementing them and they have really great acronyms.

00;29;09;15 - 00;29;31;29

One is called CARE and the other is called FAIR. Right? So I think this this comes back my to your question, there is no one way to answer that question. I think the ways you answer this question is by providing a framework that allows people to use a framework to answer the question for their particular situation. Okay, So FAIR stands for findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

00;29;31;29 - 00;29;48;27

And it tells us how to share. It tells you how to create your data set, use persistent identifiers, you know, make sure that this is there is some way for people to request access to your data set, whether that it's in a repository of a landing page, make sure it's interoperable, that there is a good set of metadata.

00;29;48;27 - 00;30;10;29

Well, describe to explain what the heck's in your dataset. Right. And then make sure it's reusable, right. That there is some way to pull it down into a file, share it. It's already in a database or our code, whatever it is, right? That that's all there. So that's FAIR. How do I create and curate my data set so that it is accessible and usable by other people?

00;30;11;01 - 00;30;37;02

But there's also another component that is as important, and these are enshrined or encompassed in the CARE principles, and these were developed through the lens of Indigenous data sovereignty, and they provide a framework for what to share, right? So CARE stands for collective benefit authority to control responsibility and optics. And like when you're working with biomedical data, you know you can't share personal level data, period.

00;30;37;08 - 00;30;58;10

That is ethically wrong. To share personal level data, you have to identify it. So that's a component of, for example, what you could put in CARE. Do you have the authority to control the data that you're sharing, or does somebody else have the authority? For what benefit are these data being shared? These are all really important questions to ask when you're when you're sharing data.

00;30;58;10 - 00;31;18;01

So as gets to like, I'm really big on attribution, right? So I think and I don't think it's even I think I'm just going to make the bold statement that we have to recognize the rights of the people from whom data are collected. I think for too long we've only recognized the rights of the people who are collecting the data.

00;31;18;06 - 00;31;42;15

Right. And I don't think that finders keepers should be the ruling ethos for how we share data. I think we can do a lot better and the CARE principles get us there with that collective benefit authority, control, responsibility and ethics framework. And so between CARE and FAIR, we address for people and purpose, and together the guidance is share your data as openly as possible and as closed as necessary.

00;31;42;15 - 00;32;06;28

So there isn't just open data shared with everybody. It's like, let's really think through what's in this data set. Do I have authority to share it? What is my responsibility for protecting the information that's in this data set, and how can I collectively benefit the community by sharing? How can I do this in an effective way? And I really, really love how these two sets of principles work together and foster this way of thinking.

00;32;06;28 - 00;32;35;02

This framework about intellectual property that is intentionally respectful for the full set of stakeholders and rights holders of the data that's represented in the data set. So that may not be as specific as an answer as you want, but I think that's the best way to address this is using these frameworks. It does. It sounds like it. Oracle for Research has actually provided research to commercialization support for a handful of researchers like University of Bristol biotech spin out Halo Therapeutics. Is that a good role for a big old tech company like Oracle to play? Is that appropriate? Oh my God. When I met you guys at the Research Data Alliance meeting, I was so excited to know that there's Oracle for Research exists and that you guys are providing tech support for founders. I think it's awesome.

00;32;54;07 - 00;33;23;23

I do. And this is part of the collaboration I'm talking about. You have skills and resources that startups don't, and to be able to share those resources is for the collective benefit of all the parties. Awesome, right? So I think, you know, this small grant funding and technical support that you guys have done with the community, support those folks that are our need to use or want to use cloud computing, super important community building is also a big one for me, obviously, right?

00;33;23;26 - 00;34;00;19

Bringing together aspiring entrepreneurs to share their stories, to meet with mentors, to meet with other entrepreneurs. It may be a little bit farther along the pathway. Super important to do that and you're starting to do what you're doing that a bit right? Supporting collaborations. One of the things I've heard over and over again in this data space is, yes, there's these cloud computing services, but one of the big challenges is the middleware that's needed to enable access to the data in the cloud server that's respectful of privacy and any like data sharing challenges that you might have.

00;34;00;19 - 00;34;25;28

Right. In that that federated sign and piece is really challenging for a lot of folks building these data infrastructures. So there may be some some role that you can play in helping to support collaborations to answer some of those questions. And it's not saying that there's a particular product that you guys can build, but maybe say, hey, here's some options, here's how they can be implemented, here's some folks doing it right.

00;34;25;29 - 00;34;52;09

Why don't we have a meeting or something to help others figure out how to also implement those? And then the thing you guys have been doing, again, partnering. We talked about research, data Alliance. I think you also participate in these giant and TNC meetings looking for opportunity is to work with research networks and identity federations and data sharing alliances in developing these cross-platform solutions that work on a global scale.

00;34;52;15 - 00;35;22;04

All of those are great. So I think when I look at this, is providing some hope right. We have this great idea as an entrepreneur and is like, Oh my God, how am I going to do this Right? Providing some hope to those of us who who want to start developing a tech-based product for the research community, that someone out there is willing to share some resources to help us test our idea.

00;35;22;04 - 00;35;51;10

I think that that would be the way I would think about it. Yeah, well, technology as a driver, it's an enabler for nearly all research entrepreneurs and biotech founders. There's no way around that. But as we're seeing with AI, technology appears to pop up and move at incredible speed. So what do you think researchers should be doing to make sure they understand what the right technology is and how to use it for things like cost, performance, security, flexibility, scale, those things?

00;35;51;13 - 00;36;14;02

Yeah. And so I was thinking about this and, you know, tech is necessary for everyone, as you know. Right. And, you know, I work with a lot of small businesses through my SCORE mentoring volunteer service. Right. And these are people starting restaurants and hair salons and retail outlets. And, you know, they're like, how do I do this? They also have to use cloud-based solutions, right?

00;36;14;02 - 00;36;38;18

Accounting, e-commerce platforms. They have internal external communication platforms like the storage slack and other things like that, discord on customer management systems out there. All of these things people think of tech and they think of cloud computing and massive compute resources that you need for time. Actually, yes, you need that, but you also need these other cloud solutions.

00;36;38;18 - 00;37;00;14

If you're going to run a business, you have to have all of these other kind of operational pieces as well. Right? And there's other things like, Oh my God, I have to look at mileage tracking and receipts management, inventory control, all the things no one wants to think about, but they're all essential parts of running a company. And all of these to also have cloud-based solutions.

00;37;00;14 - 00;37;20;21

You don't have to do stuff on a spreadsheet that's only on your computer. You can have it in the cloud, you can move around. This information comes with, you can easily share, you can collaborate on documents. And I think Mike, to some degree, I think people need to pay attention to this as well, right? They have to do this as well.

00;37;20;23 - 00;37;42;06

Things like SCORE, right? Used to be only face to face mentoring now is almost I think over 90% of mentors now in the space of three years shifted from face to face to virtual meetings and like it was like, oh, I didn't do this earlier. An orchid was run as a virtual office From the very beginning. We never had a building, never.

00;37;42;10 - 00;38;12;28

And my consultancy is also virtual, right? So it's how do we use these wonderful cloud-based resources to really expand how we can do our work, where we do our work and open up time that we didn't have before because we were running around or trying to share documents through email or trying to collect all these things that the cloud is made possible for us that really enable collaborative work I think is great.

00;38;12;28 - 00;38;34;14

So your question, what tech do you use? And this is a question that can't be answered easily. Again, it depends on the stage of your company, the size and scale of your team where you're operating and of course your product, right? So I will always take an iterative approach, have a conversation. Where are you in your evolution as a company?

00;38;34;14 - 00;38;55;19

What is your product? What are your needs? And then also make sure my big advice is make sure when you pick a technology for whatever it is that, it is something you can evolve and adjust and iterate with. Then, you know, if it's one particular platform, make sure has an API, make sure you can get your data in and out of it.

00;38;55;23 - 00;39;18;21

So as your needs evolve, you can transition to something else if you need to. That better suits you need as a company. Don't get locked into a particular solution because you'll find like if you get locked into one, I don't know, customer relationship management system or fundraising system. And then you can't move as your company gets bigger, you're kind of screwed.

00;39;18;27 - 00;39;44;25

So you have to make sure you you plan for, in my opinion, to plan for flexibility from the very beginning to allow you to grow and evolve as a company. And then that last thing, it comes back to experience at work. It ensuring privacy. What did you actually need to collect? Right? And if you have to collect personal love with data, make sure that you're ensuring the privacy of the people you're collecting it from.

00;39;44;25 - 00;40;06;10

So that's always a big one for me. And that's where Cloud Solutions not putting this stuff on your laptop are. So, so important. Well, we talked a good bit about partners and partnerships. Some people like to try to partner with our friend, the federal government. Federal funding is critical for academic and nonprofit researchers, the NIH as a funder.

00;40;06;17 - 00;40;28;16

It's driving change in the research space with things like the updated data management and sharing policy. And that policy is that researchers now have to plan and budget for the management and sharing of data when they apply for a grant. Are these mandates going to lead to real and meaningful changes or is it window dressing? What's your take?

00;40;28;18 - 00;40;50;25

Oh, another story. So one of the early community stories we did, ORCID had a question about mandates. There are always these conversations about mandates and the folks that would do put in place the mandatory oh, we couldn't possibly put in place the mandates or just irritate the people who would use it like the publishers can't put in place mandate because then the authors won't come to our platform.

00;40;50;25 - 00;41;18;20

We'd want to put up any barriers to, you know, to people using our stuff. But we did the survey and one of the questions on it was, Hey, would you want work it to be mandated by publishers? And since surprisingly, something like 80% of the respondents said mandate organ, we're like, okay. And that in turn, the funders and publishers are like, Oh, I had no idea people would be into this.

00;41;18;20 - 00;41;40;14

So that, you know, it was like researchers asking for a mandate in in a way with the researchers were asking for was would the publishers and funders please use ORCID? Please just use it so we can use it as researchers and gain the benefit. It was an interesting kind of reverse way of doing the mandate. So I think now we see these two stories about mandates.

00;41;40;14 - 00;42;08;28

You know, no one ever mandated Google search, right? It was remains as elegant and easy solution of finding things on the Internet. People still use it in droves, even with problematic privacy frameworks or revenue model. Right. It's because it's so easy. This just does what supposed to do. You get in and out your data, right? So why do we need to resort to mandates to get people to use things and do things that should be good now, which gives me to my second comeback, right?

00;42;09;02 - 00;42;32;21

Things like ORCID and data sharing are usually promoted or marketed as quote unquote good for us. It's like eating broccoli. Some people like broccoli. A lot of people don't like broccoli or they will not go out of their way to eat broccoli like a guy eats broccoli because it's good for me. But given this choice between green vegetables and I don't know, chocolate, I'm sure most people will head for the chocolate.

00;42;32;24 - 00;43;08;16

So why don't we design things and workflows and incent dev structures that provide the sweets that people want? Right? So these research policies that are enforced by mandates are usually ways getting researchers to do things that, you know, I like broccoli, I got to eat my broccoli. And then if they don't work very well because the systems haven't been designed in the workforce, haven't been designed to make it a delicious experience for the researchers, where you might I actually need to use the mandate because everything just works well.

00;43;08;19 - 00;43;47;10

Right. And the other problem here is that the culture of research is also about kind of protecting experts in this. Right. And so when you're talking about data sharing, if there isn't something that's done with data sharing that makes it attractive to share data, not just you must do it, but it's actually, hey, this is going to help me in my career, then the mandate, you know, it's just going to be this that people put up with and will find ways of getting around and delaying because they don't see the benefit to them in actually sharing the data.

00;43;47;16 - 00;44;32;19

And some people actually see harm. And that's a lot of the conversations that are happening at NIH today and over the past couple of years. It's like, what is that, that harm reduction that can be done to kind of reduce the barriers to data sharing. And so one of the projects I worked on that my consultancy was with the Federation for American Societies of Experimental Biology, also known as Faseb, putting together a program that kind of worked side by side with the NIH to see how can we as fast of this Federation of society is support the community in sharing data and make it an attractive prospect for researchers, not a grudging thing to do.

00;44;32;20 - 00;45;04;15

Right. So that gets back to I mean, you guys talk about this all the time, I'm sure. How do we work with our communities to design products and workflows that work for them, that are seamless, that are delicious, that provide a benefit? This is all user centered design. And I feel like sometimes what happens in the research community is people forget some of these basic design principles and they use these sticks through the form of mandates to get stuff accomplished because those design principles just aren't practiced in the community.

00;45;04;15 - 00;45;25;19

And so again, coming back to NC three, that big COVID collaborative, it made data sharing easy for users with this metadata model that was partly automated and also a service to help researchers with the curation process. Instead of saying you must curate your data, they'll say, Hey, you need to curate your data and we'll help you with it.

00;45;25;21 - 00;46;03;14

Huge difference, right? And at facet of this Data works project actually provided a substantial award, $100,000 for two teams that could show their data sharing and the impact that data sharing on a community that's not just a $5,000 prize, it's not just a little ribbon you get. It's a substantial award. And they had over a hundred teams submit applications for these awards and get a fabulous recognition by the NIH and the broader community and can show the way for others, Hey, we made this work.

00;46;03;14 - 00;46;31;16

Here's how made it work. They become ambassadors in the community and provide that incentive and mentoring for other people who are interested in sharing data. So I think that's what needs to happen. So you asked about, you know, what will mandate help? Yes, it has raised the urgency of data sharing in the biomedical community. Right. There's still a gap between this desired state and operationalizing how we share data.

00;46;31;18 - 00;46;54;13

And there is this series of surveys called the State of open data that happen to be going on for four years now. They've found a consistent desire among researchers to share data, but also a consistent need for more and better pathways to do so that also embed this attribution and respect components we've been talking about. So I think that's where we need to go next with the competence will make progress.

00;46;54;20 - 00;47;25;15

We're already making progress. We need to celebrate success and we also need to collaborate on a user design system and mandates like NIH is doing could be part of the solution. But they're not the solution. They're not the only thing we do. I've convinced myself I like broccoli, so self-delusion is very underrated. Yeah, well, Laurie, this has been a great conversation, super useful to those listening that are in that place of I've researched an innovative product.

00;47;25;15 - 00;47;42;14

Now what you know, thank you so much again for making the time. And if people want to know more about you or what Mighty Red Barn does, is there any contact info for you? Yeah. So you can come to my LinkedIn profile. Probably the best way to get me. I mean, I have a Twitter profile ID at Hack Yack.

00;47;42;17 - 00;48;02;11

Probably the best way, however, to get me is through my website at www dot mighty red barn dot com and there's a contact us form on there and I'm happy to talk to folks where you can contact me through LinkedIn and you to send me message that way. So yeah thank you very much I really really enjoyed the conversation today.

00;48;02;11 - 00;50;14;27

Really good questions. That's great. Me too. If you are interested in how Oracle can simplify and accelerate your research, all you have to do is check out Oracle dot com slash research and join us next time on Research in Action.

In this episode, we talk with Matt Seltzer APR, Partner and Head of Research and Strategy at S2 Marketing in Las Vegas.

Matt is a PRSA Board Member in the Las Vegas Valley Chapter and has spent his career in the public relations industry honing his skills as an expert researcher. He uses these skills to help clients communicate with their audiences more effectively, which is especially important when you're working with a diverse audience.

We'll discuss why research is so important in the PR industry, as well as how you can understand the tools to better understand a multitude of research factors.