PRF is excited to announce that the Rita Allen Foundation will support “Expanding the Reach and Impact of the IASP Pain Research Forum Correspondents Program.” This project will make the PRF Correspondents program, a science communications training experience for young pain investigators, more widely available to researchers throughout the world. Its purpose is to provide participants with knowledge, skills, and best practices needed to communicate pain science effectively to experts and non-experts alike, in order to help raise awareness of chronic pain and the need for basic scientific research to address it.
While previous versions of the Correspondents program have taken place at face-to-face pain meetings, PRF will run the expanded program virtually for the time being, considering that many conferences have been postponed or canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Rita Allen Foundation previously supported the launch and development of RELIEF, PRF’s companion website for patients and other members of the general public.
“We are excited to build upon our long-standing relationship with the Rita Allen Foundation by establishing a new partnership that will allow us to bring the PRF Correspondents program to a much wider group of early-career pain researchers,” said Neil Andrews, PRF executive editor. “It is particularly important to provide these kinds of training opportunities at this difficult time, when many pain research activities have been temporarily curtailed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Rita Allen Foundation’s strong commitment to advancing science communication, civic engagement, and pain research makes it an absolutely ideal partner for this work.”
“Chronic pain is a growing civic science problem – one that urgently needs new investment and understanding,” said Elizabeth Good Christopherson, president and chief executive officer of the Rita Allen Foundation. “The Pain Research Forum’s Correspondents program will help create the connections across scientific discovery, effective communication, and diverse communities that we need to share and inspire new solutions.”
“This is important training for young scientists in the pain community,” said PRF Editorial Board Chair Ted Price, University of Texas at Dallas, US. “It will broaden the societal impact of all of our work and will create new career opportunities for some of the top talents in our field.”
The new grant will allow PRF to expand the Correspondents program to 40 additional early-career pain researchers, including undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral investigators, over the course of two years. The support will be used to provide the training to the Correspondents, who will conduct interviews and podcasts with pain researchers, provide news and virtual meeting coverage of new findings, and produce other content. All content generated by the Correspondents will go through PRF’s rigorous editorial process and be published on PRF and RELIEF.
Additional information about the Correspondents program, along with the first call for applications, will be announced in mid- to late May.
About the Rita Allen Foundation
The Rita Allen Foundation invests in transformative ideas in their earliest stages to leverage their growth and promote breakthrough solutions to significant problems. It enables early-career biomedical scholars to do pioneering research, seeds innovative approaches to fostering informed civic engagement, and develops knowledge and networks to build the effectiveness of the philanthropic sector. Throughout its work, the Foundation embraces collaboration, creativity, learning, and leadership.
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