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Leveraging Your Research—Mapping Our Future

Director of Translational Research, Department of Orthodontics, New York University College of Dentistry, 345 E. 24th Street, Room 1003 S, New York, NY 10010, USA; edr1{at}nyu.edu

Science is the irritant that leverages change and innovation. In the next few minutes, I will pose to you three challenges to make your science that irritant, levering our research and mapping our future.

This week, you will have some rare opportunities. At meetings like these, we network with colleagues. But how often do you discuss your findings—and their implications—with someone who isn’t in the same field?

Do you talk to others who don’t understand your work—and translate so they can "get it"? By seeing results through different eyes and expertise, we have the possibility of real breakthroughs. But that’s not easy to do. We’re all caught up in our own language. Calculus means quite different things to engineers, cardiologists, and dentists. Vector might be a plasmid or a mathematical concept. Does a scanning electron microscope reveal microstructure or macrostructure? So I offer you the challenge to learn to become scientifically multilingual. Learn from colleagues in other fields. Perhaps you can use this meeting to begin. The Late-breaking News session will include abstracts from multiple disciplines. Each presenter has been asked to present his or her results so that very intelligent colleagues who know nothing about one field can understand another. It might be a good way to try to learn something new—and could trigger an innovation in your own thinking. David Grier, our Distinguished Lecturer on Saturday, is a master at this and presents complex information in a way that is understandable and engaging. I urge you to attend his presentation—you’ll be delightfully surprised at what he has to say.

Now for the second challenge: One group that has often been undervalued is corporate-based researchers. I submit to you that they may have even worse pressures to perform than we in academia. More often than not, instead of having to fight for funding, they have to limit their vision to the corporate mission—and don’t have the luxury of letting their research take them wherever it may. But they have a higher potential for seeing their results commercialized. Translating basic science into clinical practice and/or commercial products clearly has impact. My challenge to you on this front is to determine how you might interact with other researchers to drive the influence of your efforts beyond their current limits. Clearly, this meeting provides very fertile ground for your collaboration, cross-fertilization, and innovation. At this meeting, a special symposium will focus on product development. David Wong from UCLA and Roderic Pettigrew, Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and BioEngineering, our distinguished speakers for Thursday and Friday, are both experts in this arena and, I suspect, will provide much food for thought.

And the third challenge: We have tremendous opportunities available to us. But we also have some looming threats. So my next challenge relates to minimizing these threats. The greatest of these, at least for the majority of us, is the impending cuts in Federal research spending. One of the AADR’s missions is to represent the scientific community on issues related to oral health research. There is open—and continuing—dialogue with policy-makers. This offers tremendous opportunity for us, both to make our incredible findings known, and to map our directions by influencing both funding levels and priorities. But it only works if we participate! So, my last challenge to you is to use the AADR to make your voice heard. You can make a difference—but you need to be engaged. Sign up to be an AADR Cohort or National Advocate, and when you get a Legislative Alert from Daryl Pritchard, our Director of Legislative Affairs, follow through and contact your Congressional Representatives. It’s incredibly easy, but it needs your participation. Volunteer to serve on an AADR committee—all it takes is to let us know that you’re interested. Vote. Less than one-third of the membership votes in each AADR election, yet I know that many of you have ideas and suggestions to improve the organization. Talk to your officers. It’s our job to represent you as we set future directions for the organization and for dental research—and as we have dialogue with policy-makers. If we don’t act, we’re squandering a powerful resource.

The impact of science comes when someone else does something differently because of what you did! I’ve offered three challenges:

• to learn to become scientifically multilingual,
  
• to determine how you might interact with other researchers to drive your efforts beyond their current limits, and
  
• to use the AADR to make your voice heard.
  

This meeting provides a fertile ground to begin. We already have had an impact. Together, as colleagues and as an organization, we can have an even bigger impact. Thank you for the opportunity to work with you to make even greater things happen!

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