Earlier this year, CTSI hosted a brief visit by six Russian scientists and senior health administrators through the Russian Sister Cities Build Healthier Communities program.
The program aims to build effective partnerships with academic institutions, to improve translation of research into commercial technologies/products, and to improve learning outcomes by creating meaningful opportunities for students, and to learn how to build effective partnerships in prevention and care, among other things.
Visiting the University of Minnesota
CTSI Education, Training, and Career Development Director David Ingbar, MD, helped the group learn how CTSI’s programs:
- Create a sustainable infrastructure that supports clinical translational science research at the University of Minnesota,
- Foster meaningful relationships and transparent interactions among the U of M and local communities, and
- Train interdisciplinary clinical translational science teams.
Through dialog and questions via interpreters, the group discussed how CTSI identifies and nurtures promising translational ideas, how approvals work for human subject research, how novel ideas get into clinical settings, how the University of Minnesota handles intellectual property and income derived from those ideas, and how the University decides which ideas to invest in.
Visiting Minneapolis
While in Minnesota, guests also visited with senior officials from the Minnesota Department of Health, Office of Statewide Health Improvement Initiatives, University Enterprise Lab, Health Partners, the City of Minneapolis Mayor, Meet Minneapolis’ Senior Vice President of Public Affairs, and the Minneapolis Department of Health, Public Health Laboratory.
The four-day visit was sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, which coordinates about 400 international visits annually. Local program support was provided by Global Minnesota.
“Representatives from Global Minnesota were appreciative of CTSI’s participation and it was a pleasure to establish a new relationship with them,” Cieslak said.
The Russian sister city to Minneapolis is Novosibirsk, which is the third-most populous city in Russia with more than 1.6 million residents. It is in the southwestern part of Siberia on the banks of the Ob River.