The long rows of display boards inside a ballroom at the Central Bank Center will soon be filled with explanations of different kinds of translational research. Down one of the rows, Monica McGrath, a UK medical student, is prepping her poster on a project she's been working on for years, improving methods for screening hearing loss in children in Appalachia.
It's far from a simple process.
"So it's been really eye opening in terms of how many steps it takes to get this sort of idea even started," she says.
And that's the crux of translational science — the work it takes to translate findings in a lab into settings where they're actually in use, whether hospitals, schools, or other workplaces.
The event also brings in around 60 students from Frederick Douglass High School who have been tasked with researching particular topics. Then Dr. Philip Kern, a co-director of the center, says they get a lesson that sometimes sparks a deeper interest.
"They've kind of read about this in the textbook, and then I try to say, okay. Let me tell you what it's really like when someone has a heart attack. Let me tell you what it's really like to have diabetes. And and it just see their eyes open because they they they read about it, but they haven't really lived it," he says.
McGrath's project and many others at the conference are funded through the NIH, the largest funding source for medical research in the world, and also another agency targeted for major cuts by the Trump administration.
Kern says people often equate new drugs and treatments with the pharmaceutical companies that put them on the market, but that's not where the process really starts.
"These drugs are are manufactured by a drug company, but the discoveries all came from the NIH funded research," he notes.
The hope is that events like Tuesday's conference drive home just how vital the early research — and the work to get it from the lab to the doctor's office — is to modern medicine.