-: My name is Meghan Munger,
and I am the Supervisor of Research Operations
at Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare.
So we're a non-profit hospital.
We're in St. Paul, Minnesota.
We've been around for over 120 years,
and our mission is to help take care of kids and adults
that have complex conditions,
so cerebral palsy, spina bifida,
scoliosis, traumatic brain injury.
So I lead a group of coordinators and assistants
and as a team, we help our investigators, our scientists,
our clinicians perform their research.
So we help find participants
and ask if they wanna participate,
give them the pros and the benefits
about every study, so they're informed.
We also help with grant applications.
We are involved, there's a lot of regulatory work,
so back and forth, dealing with human subjects' protections,
so we help oversee all of that.
We are doing a lot of writing,
gathering metrics on our patient population,
trying to assess is it even feasible
to do the research project at Gillette.
So looking at a lot of our clinical patient care,
trying to figure out will
this scientific idea even work at Gillette.
Other deadlines are writing manuscripts,
so there might be analyzing data, writing to journals
in hopes of again, disseminating
some of the research that we do.
So a project that I'm working on right now,
we're trying to better understand the long-term outcomes
of one of the surgeries that we do at Gillette.
So at Gillette, we do a lot of interventions
on children and adolescents with the hopes
that it'll make their lives better as they're adults.
But there's actually no evidence
out in the literature that supports that,
and we really wanted to be able to contribute that.
So we have a study right now where we're looking at,
we're inviting back adults who are over the age of 21,
based on surgery that happened to them as children,
and then we're also inviting back other children
who did not have that surgery.
And then we're taking a look now,
doing some functional tests,
some quality of life questionnaires, pain measures,
to get a better understanding of how our treatments
are helping families or how they're not.
And then if they're not, we can learn from that,
and inform our clinicians to make better choices.