Translating Science from Research Agencies to Policymakers and Practitioners

Patrick Gallagher So NIST is a research agency, there's no question that anyone looking at NIST sees a science and technology agency filled with scientists doing research. But at NIST it's better to think of yourself first as a mission agency. And we're here to deliver a specific mission; to develop and deliver a public benefit. So when you look at it that way, you design your programs around how are you gonna deliver a public benefit, and then you look backwards at all the various pieces within the agency that do that. Research is going to be one of the most important ones; it's the key enabler under--sort of the foundation for what you do as an agency. So we have found it helpful to sort of design the programs backwards, so you're looking at the public benefit you're trying to deliver and look at all the ways that you do that, then look at how the research supports that goal. But when you do that you find that the translation, the research translation has been sort of built into your programs. In the case of research, whether you're talking about criminal justice where you're trying to translate ideas into the practice of law enforcement or whether you're talking about the broader issue of innovation, and you're translating research results into economic growth, one of the things you realize is that the research, while a key starting point, that's where the knowledge generation is really focused, it's not the only piece. You need a lot of other participants, including the real practitioners that do the work who are gonna use those research results, whether it's in a manufacturing setting creating jobs or whether it's in a police department using these new methodologies to solve crimes. So you have to create a mixture, a mixing between the research community and the practitioner community. That's where all the magic happens. And that's something that has to be nurtured deliberately, and you have to design specific ways to make that happen. It's not always gonna happen naturally, and that's where you see breakdowns, I think, in translation of research results, so there should be a lot of focus on how do you create p[partnership mechanisms, vehicles for developing a shared research agenda, real discussions about the problems of translating research results to practice. Those are all important and they only come when the community is working together in this partnership way.

[End of video clip]