<iframe src="https://player.blubrry.com/id/36735956/" width="100%" height="138px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Wendy Nilsen is Program Director for the Smart and Connected Health program, a partnership between the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She shares what interdisciplinary research looks like from the funding agency perspective, and explains her role as a program officer. We also discuss the Mobile Health Training Institute, which she helped found to build interdisciplinary skills across computing and health, and the essential skill of building relationships and asking questions.

Bio

Wendy Nilsen, Ph.D. is a Program Director for the Smart and Connected Health Program in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the National Science Foundation. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology and health. This includes a wide range of methods for data collection, data analytics and turning data to knowledge. Her interests span the areas of sensing, analytics, cyber-physical systems, information systems, big data and robotics, as they relate to health. More specifically, her efforts include: serving as cochair of the Health Information Technology Research and Development community of practice of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program; the lead for the NSF/NIH Smart and Connected Health announcement; convening workshops to address methodology in mobile technology research; serving on numerous federal technology initiatives; and, leading training institutes. Previously, Wendy was at the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR).

Transcript

Andrew Miller:             Well, so Wendy, thank you so much for talking with us today. The first question that I ask everyone on this podcast is what first got you interested in research or in science or in computing?

Wendy Nilsen:              Mine is a step-wise interest. I actually was in, before I moved into science, I was in industry and I ran a large company. I was a production manager and then the vice president of manufacturing. I found that I didn’t understand people’s behaviors the way I wanted to, things were happening that didn’t make sense. I learned how to deal with them as a manager, but I really wanted to understand exactly what was going on. Was there a process, where should I be intervening, what should I be doing, what kind of …? Why were people doing thing that were clearly seemingly irrational.

I ended up leaving industry, going back to school, and getting a degree in psychology, which told me that I was never going to know all those questions unless I worked really hard. That led me into the work that I did in my early research and then, as I realized that the work I was really interested was at a higher level, at a science policy level. I came over to the NIH. That was exciting. Gave me a very different view, but it also then exposed me to computing. Once I realized that computing had so much to offer, the health world in general, but especially I think the behavioral community is it’s such an open area. So much of health, if you ever look at the NIH website and the images that are changing, the stories that are coming on every day … either physician behavior, patient behavior, environmental issues, and people’s behavior. It’s talking about opioid epidemic or it’s talking about heart disease, all of these have a behavioral component and thinking about how does computing work in with that, computing and engineering is become, and I’m really excited by.

Andrew Miller:             Yeah, so you were originally in the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. Is that right?

Wendy Nilsen:              Yes. In the Office of the Director at NIH.

Andrew Miller:             I also believe that you were involved very early on in what started out as the Smart Health Program and has now bloomed into the Smart and Connected Health Program. What was that like? What was it like doing this delicate dance between the NIH and the NSF and health and basic science research.

Wendy Nilsen:              Well, I started this because … or I didn’t start. NSF started Smart Health and Wellbeing with me, Misha Pavel and Howard Wactlar, but they were really kind of looking at how to position it, how to think about it. They had started. It was early 2012 was really their first year moving. I met Misha Pavel in 2013 thanks to one of my colleagues in computing and we decided to partner, which I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do because it never occurred to me I wasn’t. I wasn’t encouraged to partner across government. We partnered and one of the reasons, the main reasons, that we partnered was because I found out we spoke different languages, we had different cultures. What I considered to be my science, computing instead was an application.

I found out that often I was viewed as a clinician. Often my colleagues in computing were either programmers or technicians, so there was a huge gap in understanding. There was also a huge gap in the developmental pipeline. If you don’t start from the beginning as a multi-disciplinary team, it’s very hard to once something’s built to then make it work in a new system that is completely different than the system you developed it in. I think a great example is falls, research in falls. For years, research in falls was done with college students pretending they were going to fall and predicting that. We thought that was the best way to do it. It turns out that the people that fall don’t fall anything like a college student, so all of that research had to be redone with real people who fortunately don’t fall that much, but creates all new issues.

We started this program really to build the pipeline of people who are working together from the beginning on the right problems in using really synergistic and transformative approaches to changing problems that are literally killing our country.

Andrew Miller:             Yeah. One of the interesting things I remember from being a student whose work was funded by that program was that suddenly those of us on the computing side were exposed to this whole world of these other people on the other side and that was just sort of on the researcher side. I imagine that you mentioned briefly that you spoke sort of complementary or different languages. How did you negotiate that balance? How do you think about the way that that program has developed over time?

Wendy Nilsen:              The language is something we’re learning. I’ve run many, many, many panels at NSF every year. Many for the Smart Health Program and I think one of the things that research review helps us do is to build that language. To have a conversation, really respectfully and excitedly explore. When I’m talking about dissemination is it the same thing you mean? When you’re talking about ground truth, is it the same thing I mean by gold standard? What are we talking about, how are we talking about them? What’s important, what’s not important? How do we calibrate things to the various disciplines? I think this is what’s exciting and I see it developing in the community in terms of conferences and meetings. I see it also happening in review and especially, the best of it in my funded projects or the NSF fund health projects.

Andrew Miller:             A couple of years ago now you crossed the boundary and moved from the National Institutes of Health to the National Science Foundation. What was the impetus for that and what was that change like for you?

Wendy Nilsen:              Well, the impetus for that was it was more fun at NSF, but oh, I shouldn’t probably say that, should I? No, nothing against my colleagues at NIH, but I mean, we talk about lifelong learning, I love lifelong learning. I come over to NSF, I learn new things every day. I have colleagues in computing, engineering, physics, you name it, and the sciences are so exciting when they come together. When I came here I started learning that what I knew in bringing people together crossed the boundaries at NSF, so I’m a team member or a leader on many of our projects that cross the boundaries between disciplines because that’s one of the skill sets I have is building … I’m a whatever on this, science representative on our convergence working group and because I have the expertise on how do you bring people together. It’s been really an exciting thing. I came over in 2015 … or 2014 I think originally, as a rotator, just like most of the program offices at NSF, and then when they asked me to stay, I was thrilled, so I stayed.

Andrew Miller:             I’m going to ask the basic question that I’m not sure I know the answer to, which is what does a program director do?

Wendy Nilsen:              A lot of things. I would say most days the number one thing I do is talk to PIs. I talk to people that are proposing, I talk to people who’ve been reviewed, I talk to people that are getting funded. Some are much more fun conversations than others. Other days, I spend the entire day or two in review. We read, as program officers, if you’re leading a program you get all the proposals that come in, you separate them into different review committees, you are a leader with your peers on getting those reviews done, you set up the protocols for across agencies. You have