Letonia Copeland-Hardin, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago, and Myeshia Shelby, a researcher at Howard University, received funding from Research!America to develop an open-access workshop providing public engagement and community-engaged research communications training. The curriculum was developed with input from Kelsie Huff, a Chicago-based comedian. The award, together with support from the University of Chicago Office of Community Engagement and Cancer Health Equity, supports Letonia's research on humor as both a trust-building and a pedagogical tool to make genomic and data concepts digestible for community partners, so that a community-based participatory research approach can be integrated into environmental multi-omics research. Public engagement and community-engaged research are widely recommended as strategies for improving the trustworthiness of scientists and research institutions and hypothesized to address underrepresentation in biomedical studies. However, community-engaged research, which involves public engagement, is not a traditional part of graduate training for biomedical researchers. The workshop addresses the need for communication tools among researchers interested in building community-academic partnerships who lack that training. While training as a postdoctoral fellow, Letonia observed that the communication strategies employed by community-engaged researchers closely resembled those she had developed performing stand-up comedy and through improv comedy training. Slides, a facilitator guide, and an optional quality assessment survey instrument are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21464618.
Postdoctoral Fellow Teaches Researchers to Use Humor in Community-Engaged Research