I like to say that I invented the field of knowledge

translation all on my own, inside my head without knowing that it already existed

I was just asking myself what is the value of my research out there in the world?

How does society get anything back from it?

Family care partners of somebody living with dementia, for example,

they are experts at that, right?

They are the experts at the experience of caregiving.

I think without the citizen advisory group, the product that we would've had in

the end would've been very scientifically accurate and probably quite inaccessible.

Hello there.

I'm Sarah McLusky and this is Research Adjacent.

Each episode I talk to amazing research adjacent professionals about what

they do and why it makes a difference.

Keep listening to find out why we think the research adjacent space

is where the real magic happens.

Hello there and welcome to Research Adjacent episode 88.

Last time we were in the USA and today we scoot up to Canada to

Toronto to meet my guest Inbal Itzhak.

Inbal is a senior knowledge mobilization specialist for the Canadian Consortium

on Neurodegeneration and Aging.

Now, if you're based in the UK, you might have already figured

out why I wanted to talk to Inbal.

Knowledge mobilization is a term that I hadn't really come across before.

So I want you to find out exactly what Inbal does.

The answer as you'll hear, is that Inbal does a lot of what

I'd call research communication, engagement, and involvement.

She helps researchers to plan, do, and share their research in ways

that lead to tangible benefits for people living with neurodegenerative

conditions like dementia.

In our conversation, we talk about some of the language and practice

differences between the UK and Canada, why knowledge translation was a

dream job for Inbal in the sense that she literally dreamt it up before

discovering that it was an actual thing.

And why building strong relationships with health professionals and people with

lived experience makes both the research and the knowledge translation better.

Listen on to hear Inbal's story.

Welcome along to the podcast Inbal.

It is fantastic to have you join us here all the way from Canada.

So I wonder if we could begin by just hearing a little bit about

who you are and what you do.

Yes, so I'm a senior knowledge mobilization specialist.

It's a very long title.

I work at the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration and Aging.

It's a Canadian research network that focuses on dementia research

and brain health research.

And my role is basically to support the researchers in the

network when they have findings to develop for knowledge mobilization.

In other words to help them bring this science to use.

The main two audiences that I help them reach are health professionals

who can make use of the findings and the research, and people with

lived experience of dementia.

So families, people living with the illness and the general public as well.

Because this is a condition that is very much of interest.

It's so prevalent and the numbers are growing, so it is very much of

interest for the general public and who wouldn't be interested in learning

how to keep their brain healthy.

So my, my role is really to work with the researchers who are,

in not all, but many cases, not equipped to do that on their own.

Yeah, they don't have the training, the, perhaps they don't have the

time, the resources, the capacity.

So that's my role.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

I've really interesting, one of the things that I love exploring on

this podcast is all the different language and the descriptions, the

ways things all merge together.

So your job role is knowledge mobilization.

And that is a term that doesn't get used very much in the UK even though it

sounds like the activities that you're describing are very much similar sorts

of things that we do in the UK, but under different terms like public engagement

or knowledge exchange, or research communication or things like that.

So tell me a bit about, is knowledge mobilization, is that

a commonly used term in Canada?

Is that?

Yeah.

So this is an affliction of a relatively new field.

You don't find this issue with terminology as much when you look

at very established professional fields like, I don't know, nursing,

for example, to go not too far off.

So yeah, knowledge mobilization is currently the leading term

for this line of work in Canada.

Knowledge translation has been the term for a long time in the context

of health and in recent years the funding the Canadian Funding Agency

for Health Research has aligned by using the term knowledge mobilization.

They moved away from using translation.

But if you look at the scientific literature of the field that comes out

of Canada and there's a lot, both of these terms will come up, knowledge

mobilization and knowledge translation, and yes, I understand that I actually

don't notice if it's specific to the UK or just, or Europe in general.

I know there's a lot of implementation science as used, and I'd say

knowledge mobilization is part of implementation science, but it's not

so much the implementation part itself.

And yeah, there's a lot of other terms and knowledge exchange is used here as well,

but it's maybe a bit more broad, maybe a bit more in the context of private sector.

Okay.

Using scientific, but those terms are very, there's what they're

published about by scientists who work in this field, but what's really being used

by practitioners and I don't know, health professionals and people who are maybe

not the scientific leaders of the field.

It moves around a little bit and then again, it's an affliction of a new field.

Yeah.

So to help us understand then how we map what you do onto things that, that

maybe, so most of my listeners are in the UK although there are, shout out

to anybody listening elsewhere in the world 'cause I know there are some, tell

us a bit on a kind of day-to-day basis about the sorts of things that you do.

Yeah I will say that anyone with similar training to mine

is probably doing different work.

Point being that I can describe the day-to-day work, and I'll get into

some example, but I will say that other people with the same professional

certificate in other organizations are probably doing different things.

Interesting.

Or slightly different things.

Again, this is not, this is a field that's growing and coming into its own, so it's

there's a lot of variety or variation, but what I do in the day-to-day.

So an example is researchers come to us and say that they have some

findings or that they have a project that they would like to eventually

bring to families living with dementia.

And we would help them engage some people who are of that audience to

help together develop the kinds of tools or knowledge products that

these people can eventually use.

So we can develop with them things like infographics or videos or

public talks that are adapted to those specific audiences.

We will work with them on how to write.

The explain and describe and share their science in plain language.

So people outside of the scientific field can understand what they're talking about.

We will help them connect with people from this target audience.

And I gave the example of people with lived experience of dementia, but it

could also be health professionals and what did they need, how to distill.

Scientists wanna always share all the details.

It comes from good ethics.

But you need to know how to speak to an audience who's not a scientific

audience, and we help them adapt their content to those other audiences.

Does that give you an idea?

It does, yes.

Yeah, and it does sound, as I say it, it's very much, sounds like it's

mapping on to, yeah, some of what you're talking about there is what we would

maybe call research communication.

Some of what you're talking about there is what we would maybe call public or patient

or stakeholder involvement as well.

So yeah, it very similar types of work, but just slightly

different terminology for it.

Yeah.

But I think that's really useful to.

I did learn recently that it, the distinction between

using the word involvement and engagement I guess became a thing.

Yeah, it's definitely a thing.

Between Canada and Europe, i, I, we did a session in collaboration

with colleagues from Europe and the US, at an international scientific

conference and the European person told us very clearly that the word, they

have to use the word involvement because that's how they've defined that role.

But as we go into the details, we learn that what, when we say engagement and

when the Europeans say involvement, we really mean the same thing.

Yeah, I think so.

And it's interesting that yeah.

There are some nuances that I'm not gonna go into about, yeah, which

one you use in which situation.

But it's interesting that you say this knowledge mobilization in Canada is

a sort of a new and emerging field.

Maybe you could give us a little bit of the story of, how this

has become a thing in Canada.

What are the drivers for it?

Why is this, is this something that's just been happening in the

last few years or has it been, 10, 20 years it's been going on?

I'm not sure I'm qualified.

Yeah,

That's okay.

But so yeah, I invite listeners if they wanna know the details

and the accurate points about this to really go ahead and look up some

of the leading work done in Canada.

But I'd say it's been around growing as a scientific and practice

field for about 20, 25 years.

Approximately.

And.

It started, you, depending where you come from, you could say it

started in different disciplines.

I'm in the world of neuroscience and health.

So I know that a lot of work has been done in knowledge

translation in the health world.

To, with the goal of accelerating scientific knowledge being used in

the health field and health practice.

As a field of practice, like a professional field.

I think that's even a newer thing relatively speaking.

I was recently at a conference, a knowledge mobilization conference when

they did this little exercise asking people to stand up if they've been a

practitioner in knowledge mobilization in the last two years, five years, and as

the number of years increase, yeah, more and more people sat down and I think the

few people who stood up at the very end have been working in it as practitioners

for the last 20 years but that was rare.

Also, the other thing is, again, to go to terminology is that the titles of

these jobs could be very different, and they're doing the same thing, or they

could be very different also in what they're doing, so they could be working

on different parts of this maybe continuum of work from science to use and practice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because there's lots of different stages along the way and lots of different, as

you say, some people might have more of an emphasis on working with one particular

audience, or they might have more of an emphasis on producing materials or.

And it depends, where you are located with the role.

So one of my best collaborations has been working with someone with similar training

doing a similar role, but they are sitting in a health organization, where

I sitting in a research organization.

So this person is the knowledge knowledge mobilization specialist in a health

organization working directly with health professionals where, whereas I'm

working directly with the researchers, so the two of us connecting has been

one of the our best collaborations.

We understand, we speak the same language, we understand each other.

She can give me input from what the health professionals are looking for.

What are the gaps?

What are their needs?

What are the tools that they prefer?

What formats of information do they prefer?

And I can bring her what new science is coming down the pipeline and

then we do this magic together to create things that are actually

useful for the health professionals.

Yeah.

That does sound like a really valuable connection there.

And as you say, it's often when you connect the dots, sometimes the most

valuable person isn't necessarily your target audience, if that makes sense.

The people that you want to reach at the end of the day.

But you reminded me actually of a point that I think maybe

is interesting for this podcast in particular 'cause as we're talking, it

made me think of how much relationship building is a big part of my role, right?

Connecting with people who are in the interest holders side of

things or health practitioners or community organizations who are not

connected to the research world.

And then also building relationships with researchers and building trust

with them that I can do this kind of work and represent it accurately and

without losing scientific rigor and so much is relationship building.

And as someone who is trained as a researcher, right?

I have a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and I was trained as a scientist and

as a researcher, and I feel like this particular skill of relationship building

has not in my scientific training, I felt like it was used very minimally.

Whereas in my role now, I use it all the time and I enjoy it.

I enjoy the relationship building side of things.

And so I think, when you're talking about research adjacent I don't

think that, I suppose it really depends what research one is doing.

But when I was being trained as a researcher, I didn't feel like I had to

use this relationship building skill much.

But in my current role, which is supporting research becoming useful,

the impact of scientific findings, I feel like relationship building is

really central and I don't see that there are a lot of roles in the big

academic system who are doing that.

Yeah.

I think that this comes up so frequently is the importance of having these people

like you who can connect people and who can build those relationships and

actually both how important that work is, but also how time consuming it can be

and how invisible it can be because you don't, you're not producing something.

That you can point to and say, this is the thing that we've made, or

at least it might be years down the line before you come to a thing

that you can point to and say.

Yeah.

So

Yeah, it's a hard thing to report on, right?

'Cause it's hard to grasp, but then when it bears fruit, and

sometimes it takes a very long time.

But when it does bear fruit.

Amazing things can happen, but yes, thank you for acknowledging

that it is invisible work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Invisible, but really important.

So when you say that isn't something that you, that's a part of you that you weren't

using when you worked as a researcher, was that what drew you to doing this work?

Or was it something else?

Maybe instinctively it was, but I don't think I was aware of that.

Yeah, I, the thing that drew me to knowledge mobilization and out of

the researcher seat and into the knowledge mobilizer seat was that

I felt that my research, I was just asking myself what is the value of

my research out there in the world?

So I spent some public money.

A lot of research is funded by public funds, we spent some money, and then what?

What is the value?

How does society get anything back from it?

How does anybody get anything?

It really bothered me that there was no connection, and I still love neuroscience

and I'm still very interested in some of the fundamental questions about

how cognition works in the brain, but I don't, this wasn't, it wasn't

enough of a motivator for me to stay in that field as a researcher, because

I really felt that it's important that the work has some kind of impact

value outside of the discovery itself.

And sometimes, discoveries need to build one on top of the other, on top

of the other until they, they really have significant societal benefits.

And that's totally fine.

But societal benefits can even be scientific literacy just for

people to have a certain awareness of what the scientific world does.

Why is it doing things the way it's doing it?

We saw some issues with scientific literacy during the pandemic,

so there's value even in that.

Not everything that we share about science with the public has to

always be, the solution to a disease.

The big things.

Of course, we want those things, but even sharing about the scientific process is

of value t o the world outside of science.

Yeah, definitely.

And I think, as you say, because sometimes those, those tangible benefits can be

a long way down the line, can't they?

And that's always a question that comes up is people are like, they'll leave

this work until the end of the research 'cause they think that once they get

to the end of the research, that's when they'll have something to say.

But actually, if you're looking at things which build relationships and

which build trust over time, you can't just wait till the end of the research.

Or if you want to do research that's in collaboration with the people

who might be able to use it you also can't just wait till the end.

So yeah, it has to be baked into the process, doesn't it?

Yeah.

And there, there's a term that's being used in the Canadian world of knowledge

mobilization and knowledge translation, and a lot has been written on it called

Integrated Knowledge Translation.

And there are other approaches that have been compared to it, like participatory

research is a well known one, but in, in the philosophy of integrated knowledge

translation, if I hope I'm representing it well, the idea is that the target

knowledge user is engaged in the research process from early stages in the research.

Yeah.

Why is that?

One aspect is that those target knowledge users who are participating

are more likely to really pick it up and use it afterwards.

'Cause they understood from the process.

But of course you can't do that with every single practitioner, let's say.

I don't know if you're talking about physicians, you can involve

a few in a particular project.

Yeah.

But to me, the biggest thing about integrated knowledge translation or

participatory research is that the long term involvement or engagement

of these target knowledge users in the research projects, in the research in

general, hopefully should steer research questions and research and efforts

towards questions that are very meaningful to these knowledge user audiences.

And that's.

That's really the biggest thing.

Sometimes researchers come up with some fundamental research questions

that are really early inquiry and they, it makes sense on its own.

Those are foundational pieces.

But if we want to make, to benefit health professionals and if we wanna

benefit ultimately the people that they work with, the population,

the public who gets treated.

We should have the, those people engaged so that they help researchers

in a way ask the right questions or the relevant questions.

Or sometimes just tweak those questions to make the outcomes than of that

research be more relevant and more useful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I wonder if, do you have any examples of things that you've done

through this current role through the dementia research that you're working

with at the moment where something like that has made a difference?

So whether it's been, some user involvement has helped to slightly

change the questions, or you've created some materials in collaboration

that have been really useful.

So a lot of the work that I've done, was on creating

knowledge mobilization products.

And in those cases, it wasn't changing research questions themselves.

But it was definitely changing how we present research

findings to people outside.

And one example was educational online program that created for building

health literacy around brain health.

So it's called Brain Health Pro.

It's not a commercial product.

You can look it up online.

And then we had a citizen advisory group of older adults who reviewed

the entire content that was produced for this educational program, intended

for older adults like themselves.

They had a committee and they reviewed the entire content and there were cases

there where they would triage the content.

Let's say researchers sent them a chapter about vascular and heart health

and how it's related to brain health.

And it's supposed to be content that then people who are not scientists who

want to learn about how to maintain their brain health are learning from.

So these, this advisory committee reads the content and often they would

just give comments and feedback to the researchers and say, explain this,

the terminologies too scientific, this is, I don't need to know this

to know the bottom line, et cetera.

But there were some cases where a chapter wouldn't even pass the triage.

Ooh.

They the people from the committee would doing the triage, would send it

back to the researcher and say, we're not sharing this with the committee.

It needs to be simplified more, explain more, less details explain in terminology

that an average person could understand.

And then I would be working with the researchers.

And it was, I'm not saying this to disrespect any of the researchers

involved, just to say that really this is a skillset that's different than

It really is

being a scientist and in the process, the researchers learned

more about science communication, and they had me as a support link

to help adapt the chapters, bring it back to the committee and there were

multiple rounds like that of feedback.

And I think without the citizen advisory group, the product that we would've had in

the end would've been very scientifically accurate and probably quite inaccessible.

That sounds like fantastically useful process.

It reminds me of when I was first doing research communication work, and I

had a really brutal editor, and at the time I would just dread sending stuff

to her because it would come back with so many corrections and it felt so

pedantic, but I learned so much from it.

It made me a much, much better writer.

And I think it's always, whenever I am training people in research

communication, I can give people the basics as I'm sure you do.

You can say you've gotta use not use jargon and yeah.

Until you actually have that back and forth process with

somebody who, who can say.

They'll take that.

I'm sure those researchers took that feedback on board much more

than if it had come from you.

No disrespect meant to you

Right, but it does.

No but it has a validity to it.

That comes from expertise.

We like to say that we're all experts when we sit on a team that in includes

people who are not researchers.

But are people with lived experience of dementia, family care partners of

somebody living with dementia, for example, they are experts at that, right?

They are the experts at the experience of caregiving.

And sometimes some researchers also have lived experience of their own, of course.

And I, we do not dismiss that.

It's important to acknowledge the idea being is that there's a variety of

expertise, and knowledge and perspectives.

And the more we're able to combine all of them, listen to all of them,

learn from all of them, the end products are gonna be more relevant

to the people who meant to use them.

Yeah, absolutely.

More useful in the end, which is what we all want, isn't it?

Yeah.

So you said you've hinted there at that you were originally a researcher.

So tell us a bit about you.

You started out in neuroscience yourself.

What made you want to transfer to the work that you're doing now or was it

something that just evolved over time?

Yeah.

It's a little of a funny story because I like to say that I invented the field

of knowledge translation all on my own, inside my head without knowing that it

already existed and somebody's already come up with it before, and I invented

it for myself inside my imagination.

I just was going through this thinking process around the end of my PhD that

I really want the scientific findings to have use in the outside world.

And I was thinking, what if people who need science would come and talk to

me and I will help them understand it.

And a friend of mine told me it's a thing already.

Yeah.

And I described it like that.

She said go Google knowledge translation and you'll see.

Yeah.

And I did.

And it was a big light bulb.

And then I just really looked into opportunities to

learn more about that field.

And then, so in terms of making that transition, was that a fairly

straightforward process or were there any kind of, did you do qualifications?

Did you just go and get experience?

How did you navigate that?

I did both actually.

Initially I I worked, I basically worked on my own.

I tried to get a postdoc doing knowledge mobilization research.

I thought that would be good training and a logical transition, but I

was not able to secure funding.

So I couldn't do that kind of postdoc.

And so I decided I'm gonna do it anyways.

And I made myself a little website and a profile and found one volunteer project.

I say volunteer just to be very explicit about the fact that nobody was paying

me and I volunteered myself to do this.

I knew someone who was working as a speech pathologist and I asked her, what are some

of your knowledge needs as a practitioner team, you and your colleagues?

Where do you feel like you'd like to learn more about?

And I'll go and do the research for you and I'll come and explain to you what

I've found and we'll have a discussion and see if it's useful for you.

And I did that and it was.

I think it was a perfect thing because it was really getting my hands wet with what

I imagined myself that I want to be doing.

It still took a while from that point to really doing it for

real or, in, in a real position.

I eventually.

Was lucky enough in my previous job to have been to be sent for a knowledge

translation professional certificate at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto.

And the certificate is from University of Toronto.

There's a excellent program there led by Melanie Barwick.

And they have these professional certificate programs that is a week

long and it's really meant for people in similar roles to the one that I

have now, people who are working in organizations where they need someone

to be that link between science and practice, science and science use.

And that was, I think, a really good start.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it took a while, to be, and those things cost money, of course, et cetera.

It does, but I think it's also really useful for anybody

listening who's thinking about making a transition like this, to understand that

maybe you need to get some skills, you need to maybe do that voluntary work.

Certainly when I first came into science communication, I did voluntary work and

minimum wage work and all of that to get a foot in the door to meet people.

And yeah, as you say, sometimes it's a qualification that opens the door.

But yeah, you've got to, you've gotta knock on a few doors.

You've got to put yourself out there and hone what you're doing.

The only thing I would say about that is that it to, I think it's

important to mention, I don't like unpaid work, any kind of unpaid work, and nobody

does, and I'm not a supporter of that.

The reason why I did what I did was because I really needed.

I needed the experience, but not just for the CV.

I needed the experience for myself to feel, what is it really like?

I had this idea in my head of bringing science into use.

I had to try it out.

And do something and see how that felt and could it really be

meaningful to these practitioners.

And it was my first attempt.

But through discussion with them eventually I think it was of use for them.

And it helped me a lot to have a vision of what can be done, and it really

actually motivated me to try harder to get into the field as a professional.

So I'd say that if people make these choices of doing unpaid

work, either to build experience or to get the feeling of it for

yourself, just be clear to yourself.

Why are you doing it and what limitations you're putting on it.

And if at any point you feel like it's becoming abused, then, then you

really wanna step away from that.

Yeah, absolutely.

That is fantastic advice.

And as you say, although I always encourage people that if they do want

to transition from, whatever they're doing now into something quite different,

it's inevitable you're gonna have to do something to build your skills and

prove that you can make that leap.

Otherwise, nobody's gonna give you a job, frankly.

But but yeah, as you say, putting some limits on it, whether that's in terms

of the amount of work that you'll do or the level of responsibility, in a

way that feels good for you because yeah, I have definitely seen as I,

it sounds like you have as well, some people really being taken advantage

of in those kind of situations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I know that PhD graduates, when they come out and they're trying

to transition, they're desperate from some, for some work, and maybe

we'll do things for little pay yeah.

Yeah.

It's a delicate balance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I do like to ask all of my guests on the podcast, but if they had a magic

wand and they could change something about the world that they work in,

so perhaps the knowledge mobilization world for you what would you do?

So you've got unlimited time and money, what would you use your magic wand for?

I always had this imagination of a situation whereby

there's a, an authority of sorts.

We have all sorts of, if you're thinking countrywide, but any

country, in any country, right?

You have, I don't know, government ministries like a Ministry of

Health or science sometimes, and you have funding agencies.

What if there was a body that was recognized and well-known and

centralized to some extent, whose role was really to take science

into use in all fields, right?

Knowledge mobilization is done in health and education, in

agriculture and you name it.

I wish that there was an entity like that.

I'm thinking of Canada as my prime example.

If imagine there was an entity like that would be known, that would be

recognized that also as a brand, when you say to a civilian, Ministry of Health,

they know what you're talking about.

Whether or not they trust it is a different question.

I wish, I'm not sure this model would necessarily work, but I

wish there was a way to try it out without, losing all that much.

So with a magic wand, I'd definitely try that to have sort of a centralized

place where both researchers know that there's a reliable place to

go if they wanna communicate their science outward and share it elsewhere.

And also a place that would help you as a researcher build relationships

with the target knowledge users.

And would do this in a systematic way, right?

I am one person, or I, and I work with two more people in my team.

We're a very small team supporting hundreds of researchers to

do knowledge mobilization.

Obviously, we don't reach all of them, we can't support all of them, but if

there was a system that was built and set up for it, that any researcher

in the country would know this is the place to go for science communication.

This is the place to go for implementation.

But when we have an innovation.

And they would know the processes and they could guide us.

And then the public and the health professionals and the education

professionals will also trust what comes out of that place because it would be

known as that authority that does that.

So that's my little dream.

That sounds like a fantastic dream.

And there was somebody, I'm trying to think who it was in one of the

earlier episodes, who wanted to create something which made that

connecting of researchers with their potential users of the research.

Some kind of network or connecting thing for that.

So yeah there's definitely appetite for it.

I dunno how we would do it, but it is a magic wand after all.

Yeah, give it a wave and see, thank you so much, Inbal, for taking the time to come

along and tell us about the work that you do and what this knowledge mobilization,

engagement, involvement, impact, whatever you call it in Canada, is like.

If people want to find out more about you and the work that you do,

whereabouts would you send them?

If they people are interested in the work that we do

with the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration and Aging, they

can go to our website ccna-ccnv.ca

and I can be found on LinkedIn with my name.

Fantastic.

We'll get links to both of those and put them in the show notes so

people can come and connect with you if they want to find out more.

So thank you so much for taking the time and sharing all the

work that you've been doing.

It's really interesting.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

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