Leveraging Data to Find a Cure for Alzheimer’s with Lindsey Hergesheimer
Welcome to the Alzheimer's Research Podcast, a show reshaping and leading the conversation around Alzheimer's prevention, brought to you by the Alzheimer's Therapeutic Research Institute at Keck School of Medicine of USC. Whether you're a clinician, a researcher, or someone who wants to change their mind, these conversations explore the possibilities within reach to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer's disease. I'm your host, Shelley Moore.
Mickenzie Vought:And I'm your cohost, Mickenzie Vought.
Shelley Moore:Today, we got to sit down with the ATRI clinical monitoring director, Lindsey Hergesheimer, a vital member of the medical safety group here at ATI. Lindsey shares her rich history and how her previous role in data management led her to pursue a career in clinical monitoring.
Mickenzie Vought:I really enjoyed meeting Lindsay and this particular episode. She vulnerably shared her personal connection with dementia and Alzheimer's research. And I know that a lot of our listeners are going to feel really connected with her. I loved how she sees her personal role contributing to ATR's mission to find a cure for Alzheimer's in the next ten years. And for me, she really did, bring a lot of clarity and kind of pull back the curtain on how the ATRI clinical monitoring team diligently works to bring order and protection to the research process.
Shelley Moore:Well, welcome, Lindsay. I'm so excited to have you on today. We've been working together for some time at the Alzheimer's Therapeutic Research Institute or ATRI as we call it. And you are currently the clinical monitoring director, and you've held several positions here at ATRI. But I wanted to get a little bit of background on what a clinical monitoring director is and does.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Thanks, Shelly. I'm I'm happy to to be here and be talking to you about this and be part of this. I'm excited on this new endeavor for ATRI. So I joined, ATRI in 2016. And when I joined ATRI, I joined our data management team.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And there I was helping build databases and, you know, where we collect the data for the studies that we're conducting, all of that data that participants are going into clinic and providing, we collect that data. And in data management, we're focused on what's the best way to collect that data and what programmatic ways can we clean the data. And I was in data management for a couple years and had the opportunity to move to our clinical monitoring team. And at the time was really interested in learning more about clinical research, having become very familiar with some of the data we collected, felt like a move clinical monitoring would allow me the opportunity to get a little bit more hands on experience with the clinic sites and with where we're collecting the data. So I made that transition in 2019 and have been with that team since then.
Shelley Moore:So data management, can you describe the scale and scope of what you are managing and how you are managing it in the context of studies for, like, a participant who's, you know, coming into a trial and and participating?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Absolutely. So at ATRI now, it's under our our informatics and kind of IT umbrella. And data management works closely with our biostatistics team. We would review a study protocol and say, Okay, what is the actual data points that I need to be able to analyze these primary objectives of this study. We're conducting, you know, these tests with human beings, and there's a lot more to it and a lot of detail in data management, but it's really about trying to design a dataset that can be utilized to analyze, you know, all of the the data points we're collecting from our participants and how to make them, most useful for for our analysis down the line.
Shelley Moore:So I just wanted to clarify. When we're talking about data, so people think of their data as like my name, my address, this and that. That's not really what we do at ATRI. Right? Where the data we're collecting is what they call de identified.
Shelley Moore:Correct?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Absolutely. And I think it's important to understand the role of ATRI in the clinical research that we do. So ATRI, as you well know, Shelly, is the coordinating center. So we're kind of the mothership of the study. We're not actually a clinic site.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:We're not actually interacting with study participants for most of our studies. It's not true for everything we do, but for most of our studies, we are collaborating to write a study protocol. And then we are working with clinic sites around The US and Canada. We have some sites in the European Union. We're working with them and they're the ones that are actually gonna be collecting the data.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And a lot of the times at our sites, they are obviously getting that protected health information, name, date of birth, just different information about the participants and who they actually are. At the coordinating center, we don't want that information. We actually have the sites enter everything under a de identified participant ID number, and we make a point to never in our database have two pieces of information that will connect that this human being is this participant. We like to keep that information separate and actually have strict policies we follow when there is accidentally some PHI makes it in somewhere. We have a strict process that we follow to redact that personal health information from any of our study databases, because that is one of the risks of research and we do everything we can to avoid connecting those two pieces of information.
Mickenzie Vought:And why is it so important that those pieces of information keep separate? It's a
Lindsey Hergesheimer:great question, Mackenzie. It's really to protect our study participants and protect their anonymity and and to keep our promise to them that we're gonna do everything we can to protect their their data.
Shelley Moore:And then also, isn't it have to do with the double blind placebo controlled trials that we run? Right? Maybe just describe how that dataset gets collected when we are running a double blind placebo controlled trial.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Absolutely. So I think first I'll say a double blind placebo controlled trial means that in this study, we have written the protocol such that a certain amount of participants are going to get some sort of active treatment or intervention, and another percentage are going to get a placebo, but both of these groups are going to be treated and tested and analyzed and providing the same samples so that we have a comparative group. So most of our studies are double blind placebo controlled, and what it means to be double blind is that we, the researchers and the participants, neither of the parties involved, know who is on active drug or who is on placebo. So we take some serious measures to keep that treatment arm information hidden from people that are making study decisions. And I know on our team, our clinical monitoring team, for some of our studies, we do have some team members that are unblinded.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And this means that they know exactly who is getting the treatment and who is on placebo. And we keep a strict delineation between the two teams so that there is not overlap so that we're not accidentally sharing information or even, you know, making some alluding to that somebody could potentially be on the intervention. So it's really important to us to maintain that blinding so that we are making decisions that are ethical and based in what is best for the trial, what is best for our participants, and not trying to appear as though maybe an intervention is more efficacious than it actually is. So that's really important to us in our trials that we maintain that blind and that we're practicing in a way that is best for the trial, best for the science.
Mickenzie Vought:The word that came to mind for me was integrity of it. Like you're taking very strategic intentional steps to make sure that the validity is there, but also the integrity of the study. That's fascinating.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And that's really what it is all about. And and, Shelley, back to a question you asked me in the beginning about, you know, medical safety, and clinical monitoring. One of the primary functions of our clinical monitoring team is really to, to the best of our ability, ensure the integrity of our data. We really want to put out good quality data, and that is gonna allow us, ATRI, the ACTC, all of our collaborators, to really get the best data to make informed decisions in the field of Alzheimer's disease and what we know from the data we're collecting. So and data and data integrity is definitely one of our primary focuses.
Shelley Moore:So what was the biggest difference from your data management role and the clinical monitoring? Was it what you expected it was gonna be, or were
Lindsey Hergesheimer:were you surprised? You know, it was transition for me at the time. I really enjoyed my work in data management, but it was a lot of behind the screen work. And I really wanted to get out and interact with more people and get to know who else are we working with, who else are our study sites, And also work with other teams. And being in clinical monitoring, we really do have to interact with all different departments at ATRI.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And we also get the opportunity to interact directly with our clinic sites. So at ATRI, we have a site network of over 100 sites. Being in Clinical Monitor has given me the opportunity to go out to conduct visits at our sites, to get to know the site principal investigators, to get to know the site study coordinators, to really get to know the people who are our participant facing advocates and really the people boots on the ground collecting the data. So the transition into clinical monitoring for me was a little bit of a full circle moment in data management. I was focused on cleaning data, you know, setting up the databases, but then the data comes in, We clean the data.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:We lock the database. We say this data is good for analysis. And going over to clinical monitoring, I got to fill in some of the gaps of what was happening between building a database, who's collecting the data, how they're collecting it, what are some of the challenges that they face. And so it was really fit my personality better. It's definitely been a a it was a challenging transition for me in the beginning.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I had a lot to learn, but, there was some really valuable resources, and and the director of medical safety, doctor Mike Graffey, was incredibly supportive during the transition.
Shelley Moore:So and you also took this on and then COVID hit. So tell us a little bit about what happens in the clinical monitoring world when COVID happened.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Really good question. It was a bit chaotic. And the monitoring team, we were in a point of growth. We had a lot of studies that we needed to support, and we were actually hiring. And so we had to shift to hiring people virtually.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Thankfully, because we're in a travel role, all of our team already had laptops. They already had cell phones. They were already equipped to be able to work remotely, so we had that working for us going, you know, in our our favor. But we did have to learn how to be a team virtually. And with a lot of new people coming on, how do you create that sense of team when we don't really get to physically see each other or know each other?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:So, you know, it was definitely a challenge just on the team part. And then on the clinical site oversight part, we would travel and go out to the sites and we had to stop that. It just wasn't safe for our team to be flying and, you know, going out in public really. So we had to come up with mechanisms, what can we do remotely? And then some sites, the staff wasn't able to go on-site.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:So we don't take this participant data home with us. So they couldn't access what was happening. Participant visits were having to be canceled. So, you know, it was different study to study. Some of our observational studies, which are studies without an intervention, like the ADNI study, were probably hit hardest where hospitals weren't supporting participant visits.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:They felt that it wasn't worth the risk to have participants coming in for these observational studies or for the staff to go switch up some of our processes. We did a lot remotely via Zoom. We all got HIPAA compliant Zoom accounts. And we started working with our sites via Zoom, but it could be something as hard as having a site hold up a piece of paper to the camera and say, see, they signed the document. Here it is.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:So it was pretty challenging, but I feel like we've overcome that hurdle. We're we're hybrid now. Some of us go into the office. Most of the monitors work remotely, but we go on-site regularly, and we've gotten that back. So I'm I'm glad to be on the other end of that.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah. It's interesting thinking four years into the pandemic life of the consequences that what happened when we had to go to only like necessary things and what's deemed necessary, what's not deemed necessary. I think about the whole or the research that wasn't progressed and the things that weren't able to happen because it was deemed not, you know, medically necessary. We wouldn't think about those things. We think on a personal level, I wasn't able to go to this surgery that was deemed like, you know, not as necessary versus this entire world that wasn't being able to continue to push the research forward.
Mickenzie Vought:So that is such a fascinating thing to think through. What has been that longer term impact over the four years? Like, what was missed in those times? What are the pivots that you were required to do, and what does it look like now on the research?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Once we were able to travel and get back out to our clinic sites, it was kind of a rolled out approach. We work with academic sites and private sites and different sites had different policies. And so we really just had to take it site by site, visit by visit. And like you said, Mackenzie, using a risk based approach, you know, what really needs our attention now? Where can we actually get to?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And that was the approach we had to take. And as sites were ready and able to allow us to come back physically to visit them, there was a lot of the times, a lot of work for us to catch up on. And I'll be honest, now as we're closing out some studies, we're still wrapping up some loose ends from some of the stuff that didn't get checked in 2020 or 2021 and kinda got pushed 2022, '20 '20 '3, and now we're wrapping. And and and I would say we're at the tail end of of catching up in some of those studies that were most severely impacted. But silver lining, we came out with some pretty robust remote processes.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:We learned a lot about what we could do remotely. We learned a lot about better ways that we can support the clinic sites when we're not able to physically be there. And I think in ways, it really put us in a position where we were problem solving with our sites, which, you know, it has its own challenges. But also, we came out with some better processes that I don't know that we would have pushed to establish if not for the inability to physically go there.
Shelley Moore:You talked about the observational study and also putting it into context of why would an observational study be less important than another type of study in terms of the work that we do in clinical trials versus observational studies?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:So I fight this fight every day. They are not less important. They are if I can make an argument, they are more important. We look at a study like ADNI that is observational and ADNI has informed researchers worldwide. ADNI is an open dataset.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:What's this mean? It open data sharing. So researchers worldwide can go and pull the ADNI data and they can use it in their research. So a lot of what we know about Alzheimer's research and how to study Alzheimer's disease has come from the ADNI dataset.
Mickenzie Vought:And ADNI stands for?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:ADNI stands for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. So this study started in 02/2004. It's been going on for over about twenty years now. Actually, this year was the twenty year anniversary and has a very rich longitudinal data set. Some participants, it's followed for twenty years, and you can see how these people have progressed.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:They get an annual MRI, PET scans, biomarkers are drawn, and we've learned so much. So I don't wanna give the impression that it is less important. I think it's more important. So important. But I think for the hospitals, to put a study participant at the risk that COVID presented to come in and just collect data was a risk that they weren't willing to assume compared to if somebody were in an interventional trial and they were actually coming in to get study medication, that may be more so worth the risk than just having them come in for a data collection.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I think that that's a better way to think about it, not that it was less important because it's so important.
Shelley Moore:That's a great way to think about it.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:That's great.
Shelley Moore:I was wanting to know what it feels like as a clinical monitor going to a site. Are you just like, they can't wait for you to get there? Are they afraid of when you are coming? What does it feel like? Is it just very site by site?
Shelley Moore:And, also, can you describe the difference of what a CRI clinical monitor might do that's different than another organization's clinical monitor? What makes us different?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Okay. So for your first question Sorry. What how are we received at the site? It really is site by site. And, you know, the monitors, our primary function is to ensure that the sites are following the study protocol, that they are submitting all required regulatory documents, they're filing those regulatory documents on-site.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And we're also going out and checking that the sites are making sure that study participants know what they're participating in. They have the opportunity to ask questions. They have the opportunity to review the informed consent form and have this conversation with the researchers before they commit to participating. So a lot of what we do is really checking for that compliance. And we try to keep our sites in a way that they are ready If any regulatory body, FDA, Health Canada comes in and inspects them, they can show, look, we're adequately informing our participants, we're performing the procedures as the protocol says we are, We're maintaining all the documentation we need to show that we are promoting the safety of our participants.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And sometimes, sites don't always agree that they need the level of documentation that we're requesting. But other times sites are so appreciative that their clinical monitor will come and sit and sift through documents for hours, you know, to really promote and ensure that participant safety, to really promote and ensure that data integrity. We have shared goals. We wanna come out of this with good data, with safe participants. And I think that when we can lean on remembering that we have the same goal, we can find a path forward, even if it means we're sitting down, going through documents, writing note to files, explaining things for hours.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And then your other question, what's the difference between what a monitor at ATRI may do compared to other places in kind of industry, they would call, the role we call clinical monitor, they would call clinical research associate or CRA. And we do very similar work with the exception at ATRI. Most of our studies are in Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia. And we put a lot of effort into ensuring the monitors are really trained on what Alzheimer's disease is. If it's an interventional trial, what are some of the common adverse events that we might see and why might we see those?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And so I would say that our monitors are doing very similar tasks, but we are so well trained in Alzheimer's disease, in dementia. We have a specialty, certain things that other therapeutic areas may not need to worry about. Like when we're looking at the consenting process, well, before the participant signed that consent, did the site assess their capacity to consent? Did the site make sure that this study participant can actually make decisions for themselves before they let the participant make a decision. That's something we have to think about in our patient population.
Mickenzie Vought:Be very different than a different patient population, I would assume.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Absolutely. You know? And so we or even things like using diaries. In some research when we're trying to get patient or participant reported outcomes, some researchers may use diaries. Well, in a population that might have mild cognitive impairment, you know, or advanced cognitive impairment, using a participant reported diary probably isn't gonna be as useful for us as it may be in a different therapeutic area.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:So I think for us, it's, it's really one of the things I really enjoy about working at ATRI is that we really get to hone in on, on this therapeutic area and and what does it mean and how do we provide adequate oversight of some of these nuances that are introduced in this this vulnerable population.
Mickenzie Vought:I'm fascinated to hear kind of in the trajectory of your career, I can just see this through line in this connection point of how your history in data management and kind of being in that side of the process and then coming out on the clinical side, the monitoring side to see how those points are connecting. Just feel like you put a face to some of the data you're seeing in a vacuum. But I'm fascinated to hear what have been some of the highlights and maybe the fuel for continuing in this work in this field with this population for so long. I'd just love to hear from a personal standpoint why this work and why what has kept you there?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:So my move to ATRI was very intentional. I was working in diabetes and obesity research for a clinical research organization, And I wanted to work in a therapeutic area that was more, I was felt more personally connected to. Yeah. And at the time, my paternal grandmother had Alzheimer's disease. So moving into this area, I didn't know much about it, but I quickly learned, as one does when they're at ATRI.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And in my time being there, I've really valued ATRI's approach to educating their team members. I also, during my time at ATRI, went back to school, got my master's degree from USC. I got master's in public health with an emphasis in global health leadership. It was wonderful. And I've leaned on a lot of that education since.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:But I think ATRI's approach to continuing education and advancement of its team members has really been something that has drawn me there. Not only that, I really do think that we do incredible work. You know, as I was saying, we have ADNI, which is an observational study, but we have a study very similar to ADNI, which is called LEADS. It's the longitudinal early onset Alzheimer's disease study, which is also going to be open data source. And, you know, I just feel we really get to be a piece of putting together the science and putting together what we know in Alzheimer's disease and dementia research.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And I've felt very honored to be part of that. And a tiny cog in the giant machine, but it feels good to work towards something. And anytime I see, you know, ADNI's had over 5,000 papers now written with ADNI data, and I know LEADS is going to be just as rich of a dataset. And then we even have some interventional trials that contribute to this knowledge. And whenever I see something published or pop up on on one of my feeds of something new that's been learned from one of these datasets that that I got to or or my team got to be a part of, it's incredibly rewarding.
Shelley Moore:You talk about the open data. That's something that was very unique to ADNI at the time it started twenty years ago. So can you explain what that means?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the times when research is funded by a pharmaceutical company or private companies, they take some ownership for the data. They want that data for themselves. They want what they can gain from the data. And one of the wonderful things about some of the research we do at ATRI is we do have a lot of grant funding and philanthropic funding.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And one of our guiding principles is this open data sharing model where we want to collect good quality data that we can then share with everybody so that we can really just take this data and wring out as much as there is to learn from it, from all avenues across the world, not just Alzheimer's researchers, but sleep researchers and nutritionists and dietitians and non therapeutic interventions. Also neuroimaging, what we know about MRI scans and PET scans and different radioactive tracers that they use for PET scans. I think that in these ways, when you make this data available, you open it to the world instead of just to a group of people who came in to collect this data with one mindset, you actually make it available to everybody. And it's not just like, it's not just there, and not anybody can just go grab it. You do have to apply and say, I'm doing this research.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I wanna look at it for this, but it's not a totally challenging process. And so to me, that's just so valuable. Know, we're not just when I was working in diabetes and obesity research, we were collecting data to create non brand name insulins or, you know, treatments for obesity. And it was mainly to generate data pharmaceutical companies so that they could push drugs to market. Where ATRI does, you know, we are trying to find a treatment.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:We are working with pharmaceutical partners to test some promising molecules that they have, but we're still saying, but we are also bringing our own funding. And although we're gonna test this intervention, we're also gonna share the data. And something I love about ATRI. I absolutely love that we share that data because as a study participant, if you're gonna get my data, please tell me that you're gonna use it to the best of its ability. You know, don't tell me you're gonna get my data to lock it up in a vault and only use it for one thing.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:No, I want you to use my data, you know, to learn as much from it as you can.
Mickenzie Vought:Does that change the way that a clinical trial has designed or a study is designed? I wasn't thinking of all the different implications, like from a sleep standpoint or nutrition or other things you listed. Longitudinal studies like that that are open, are they designed in a different way than say a very specific one we wanna we have very clear goals and from a
Lindsey Hergesheimer:funding standpoint? Yes and no. The protocol is still written with some primary objectives and secondary objectives and exploratory objectives. And, you know, a group of scientists comes together and decide what is it, what is our primary goal with this study? What are we hoping to get out of it?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I think that's true for both types of studies. But I do think with observational studies, we know that there's going to be times where we can't collect certain data. So it might be a little bit more flexible on requiring particular procedures. But for the most part, you know, we go in with a primary, secondary objective with, you know, clear guidance from a protocol of what it is we're hoping to collect and be able to analyze in the end. But I do think the observational studies tend to include a bit exploratory Yeah.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:You know, new researchers who have a new assessment. And so sometimes there's there's a bit more than what you might see when it's really intentional, interventional. Is this is this therapeutic efficacious?
Shelley Moore:So, Lindsay, I really wanted to get into how you fell into this line of work to begin with and what advice you'd get to young people who have never heard of this career path. What would you tell people about it, and what would you suggest they do if they were interested?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I definitely was not a child saying, I wanna work in clinical research. I actually when I was in my undergrad at UCSD, wanted to go to medical school. And after my bachelor's, I had the opportunity to deploy with the Navy as a civilian corpsman. And during that humanitarian mission, we visited several different host countries and I had the chance to interact one on one with patients. And it was an incredible experience, definitely life changing.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:But I met a commander while I was on the ship who was doing some research back in San Diego. And when I returned home, he invited me to join his study team in some clinical trials that he was conducting. And that was my first introduction to clinical research. Shortly after working with him on this one study, I started looking for work in clinical research because I really did enjoy the patient facing interaction, but I felt like when you're working in clinical research, the day to day, to me, it could feel a bit more monotonous. However, it felt like the outcome could impact groups of people and communities of people instead of one person at a time.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And that was incredibly appealing to me. And so after having this opportunity, I looked for other work in clinical research. I was able to start working in the clinic at a clinic site. I also had my EMT license, so that helped. I had some clinic experience.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And I started there and just stayed flexible. I started working with some of the data we were collecting. I started asking questions about how we're collecting it and what are we doing with it and started doing some data analysis with the data teams there, moved out of the clinic into data, and then moved from there to ATRI. So I was with that company for five years, been with ATRI now for eight years. And it was not something, like I said, not something that I had really planned, but I kept my mind open.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:And I felt like if I kept doing the things that I enjoyed doing, then I'd be going in the right path. And that's kind of what I've been doing. You know, I just tend to focus on the things that I enjoy and that I feel are are I'm good at, that I can contribute something here, and try to keep exploring that avenue. And I think it's just sticking with it. It's not all rainbows and sunshine.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:There's times that could be incredibly frustrating. You know, it often would feel like two steps forward, one step back. But I think whatever piques your curiosity, looking into it a little bit more, what what is there? There might be nothing. But even going there or you might say, wow.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I'm curious about that. Go look at it, and you're like, oh, no way. That's not for me. And that's okay too because that's learned information as well. Now you can work with that.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Okay. I know that's not an avenue I wanna explore. Let me move on to the next.
Shelley Moore:So you mentioned flexibility. Do you wanna share how you have a work life balance at ATRI?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Yeah. It's definitely something I consciously work on. Outside of ATRI, I'm also a yoga instructor. I really enjoy yoga. It's one thing that helps keep me balanced and grounded.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Beyond that, I, you know, I enjoy listening to live music, and, you know, I have a lot of family here in Southern California. I'm really fortunate to have my family here. My partner, Eric and I, we really enjoy traveling. So just trying to, you know, book some time where we're going to be, both of us be disconnected from our work so that, you know, we have things to look forward to. And just remembering that, you know, work gets really busy, it gets really hectic, sometimes everything feels like a priority.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:But if I'm not in a good space for myself, then I'm not doing my work justice. So really trying to keep balance, really trying to, you know, take the time off when it's time to take time off and be dedicated to work when it's time to work.
Shelley Moore:Yes. And you've also shared that that with us. She's done some classes at ATRI for us, and she's an amazing instructor. So she helps with our overall wellness at ATRI in addition to that. I did wanna ask you, what what's your favorite thing about your work?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:You know, it's fluctuated over the years. I think right now in this moment, I have had the opportunity to lead our clinical monitoring team. We are about 40 people and something I've really been learning over the last year, two years is how to manage and support managers. And I think in this position, something that is so incredibly rewarding for me right now is mentoring and supporting our team and seeing what we can create as a team and an environment that we can create where people wanna work, where people want to contribute, where people want to be part of the team, where people are proud of the work that they do. I feel like our clinical monitors, they travel a lot.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:They travel, you know, probably about 50% of the time. They're away from their families a lot. They're on the road a lot. But I think one of the things I've found most rewarding is although we're in this remote world and we're traveling and we're away and we're busy, we do have a sense of team. And when we get together, it's obvious.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:We we enjoy each other's company. We share experiences. And I think right now at this point in my career, that's probably one of the most rewarding things for me. I love that.
Mickenzie Vought:As we kinda round out this interview too, I would love to hear ATR celebrating ten years this year. So what are your hopes for the institute's future and Alzheimer's research?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I know it is our mission to to find better treatments and preventions. And obviously, yes, that big picture. I think on a on a kind of more within my direct vision scale, I envision our our team advancing their capabilities of some of our remote monitoring, some of how we're supporting our clinic sites, you know, improving our collaboration with our clinic sites, implementing some new technology and tools that make the amount of document collection that we have to do a bit more efficient, figuring out ways how we can use electronic platforms to improve some of our processes that can take a lot of time and are very manual. So I think, you know, more related to clinical monitoring, I'd like to see us, you know, not even more, even sooner than ten years, but you know, in the next several years, implementing some more advanced tools for how we're monitoring and really honing in on using those risk based strategies where we're getting the most efficient use of our time and giving as much protection to our participants as we can, and really using our time efficiently to support the sites, to support the study participants, and overall, the data integrity.
Shelley Moore:Is there anything we didn't ask you that you wanted to share about ATI, your role, or the Alzheimer's consortium?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:I greatly enjoy my work at ATI. I really enjoy a lot of the researchers that we get to work with. That is probably another part of my job that I really, really value is the opportunity to have face time with some of the big names in Alzheimer's research and what we know. And I consider myself incredibly lucky to get to work with this incredible team of scientists.
Shelley Moore:Yeah. And so some of the time, do you attend conferences and other things?
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Absolutely. So actually coming up in a couple weeks, well, I'll be going to the Clinical Trials in Alzheimer's Disease Conference. And oftentimes I or Doctor. Mike Raffy, who's the director of our department, we're constantly going out to these different Alzheimer's disease conventions, learning what's going on. Doctor.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Mike Raffey does a great job of bringing us back the science and what's happening communicating it to us in a way that makes sense for us. And I go out and I'm looking at what other strategies are people using in operationalizing some of the protocols, some of the clinical trials, what are some efficiencies that we're earning in how we conduct research. We do a lot to stay current with with what's happening in the world and what's relevant in the world of Alzheimer's, dementia, and also in the world of of clinical trials in general.
Mickenzie Vought:This conversation has been so wonderful. Thank you for joining us, Lindsay. I really learned a lot, and I know that our audience is gonna really love it.
Lindsey Hergesheimer:Thank you both. It was wonderful.
Shelley Moore:Thank you so much, Lindsay. It's great working with you and it was wonderful talking to you today. Thanks for listening today. If you'd like more information, please visit us at atri.usc.edu. Thank you.
