During the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory’s 2024 Annual Steering Committee Meeting in May, 2 of the program’s research fellows described their research and discussed the value of the fellowship experience.

Lindsay Ballengee, a physical therapist and doctoral student in population health sciences at Duke University, said her fellowship research builds on previous NIH Collaboratory work on the intervention delivery complexity tool.

“We surveyed members of this Collaboratory and others to find out where they landed on the different domains of intervention delivery complexity and any changes they made during their trial process,” Ballengee said. “We are analyzing that data and hope to use it to inform other pragmatic trials about the different domains of complexity and how those might come into play when implementing in future trials.”

Kaitlyn McLeod, a cardiovascular disease fellow at the University of Michigan, has worked on 2 projects during her fellowship. One project is helping the Health Equity Core better understand how health equity has been integrated into NIH Collaboratory Trials. The second project is taking the health equity framework and applying it to the Nudge study, an NIH Collaboratory Trial, where McLeod has been looking at how the area deprivation index is an effect modifier for the trial’s primary outcome.

Ballengee and McLeod agreed that one of the strengths of the NIH Collaboratory fellowship is the open learning environment and mentoring that is available from investigators and leaders.

“The most valuable experience from being a part of the Collaboratory has been not only being able to build upon previous work and put my own spin on it and ask my own questions, but just the openness of the members of the Collaboratory to mentoring and brainstorming and them really wanting to see me grow as an investigator and fellow,” Ballengee said.