Melissa Pangelinan, PhD, will serve as the new director of All IN for Health, the Indiana CTSI’s program dedicated to engaging the public in understanding the role and value of research. She succeeds Sylk Sotto, EdD, who left the position this spring.
Pangelinan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology in the School of Public Health at Indiana University Bloomington. She is also the Director of Research and Program Evaluation for the Indiana Complex Care Coordination Collaborative; a faculty member in the graduate programs in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at IU Bloomington; and a primary member of the Stark Neuroscience Research Institute.
As director of All IN, she will “create bi-directional, collaborative, and sustainable partnerships between communities and researchers to address significant health challenges faced by Hoosiers across the state,” she said.
Pangelinan is already deeply engaged in this work through her own research, which measures the impact of physical activity interventions on physical health, mental health, and brain development in adolescents and adults with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities. She has a particular focus on reducing access barriers to health interventions that may reduce the symptoms and course of Alzheimer’s Disease in people with Down syndrome.
“My research has always been driven by input from community members,” she said. “They help me identify important problems, provide feedback about whether my programs or interventions are appropriate for different groups of people, and help me translate my research in accessible ways.”
In turn, she added, her lab and the students she works with provide labor, financial support, and analytic skills to ensure both they and the community meet their collective goals.
“It’s a wonderful partnership, and is essential to ensuring programs remain in communities after the research is completed,” she said.
In her new role with All IN, Pangelinan said she will build upon Sotto’s work to improve how researchers in Indiana communicate about health and research to community members; to increase trust in health researchers; and to increase the representation of people from diverse backgrounds in research as advisory board members, co-developers of health interventions and innovations, as volunteers in research studies, and as trusted health knowledge brokers.
Pangelinan’s role was effective July 15.
For more information about All IN, or to get involved with their work, visit their website, join their research volunteer network, or participate in an ongoing study.
