Engagement, Recruitment, and Retention Certificate Program

How to Earn Your ER&R Certificate (Requirements)

To earn the official certificate, participants must complete all requirements recorded in the LMS.

1. Core Courses (5 Required): Complete all five foundational courses.

2. Elective Courses (Choose 5/8): Select and complete five out of the eight elective courses.

Once all course modules are completed, the LMS will automatically issue your official ER&R Certificate, validating your learning in this curriculum.

Key Course Delivery Methods

• Online/On-Demand: A significant portion of the curriculum is available online for self-paced learning.

• Instructor-Led Live Sessions: To fulfill the live course requirements, individuals in the certificate program must register for the designated courses offered as part of DOCR's Research Professionals Network (RPN) and Research Wednesday sessions. Registration for instructor-led sessions in the LMS is required to ensure credit is applied to your ER&R certificate. Live sessions are approved for JA credits through Duke Continuing Education.

Core Courses & Descriptions

Participants complete all core courses to receive certificates. 

Clinical Research Recruitment Regulations, Best Practices, and Tools (ONLINE) 
This online course includes information about the Engagement Policy, best practices for being thoughtful when planning for recruitment, obtaining IRB approval for your recruitment plans and materials, branding requirements when you’re targeting Duke Health patients, and Maestro Care tools that support your efforts to identify people who are eligible for your studies.

Readability Fundamentals & Participant-Facing Engagement Materials (ONLINE)
This course covers the fundamentals of readability that need to be considered when creating recruitment and engagement materials throughout the lifecycle of a clinical research study.

Smarter to be Understood: Improving Readability in Participant Engagement Materials 
A guide to health literacy and readability when creating participant engagement materials. Participants will learn strategies to support and confirm participant understanding of study materials. We’ll discuss tools you can use to design your materials (from consent forms and concise summaries to websites, flyers, and brochures) to be more accessible and readable by all potential participants.

Active Listening to Enhance Respect and Awareness of Participant Perspectives
In a highly regulated environment, it can be difficult to maintain our respect and awareness of the participant perspective, especially given the tension between “achieving recruitment numbers” and working with participants who are real people embedded in very dynamic personal, social, and family lives. We will work on building our capacity for hearing others to help us move beyond “does this person meet the eligibility criteria?” to “is this study right for this person at this time in their lives?” Course participants will learn how to use active listening to support participant-centered recruitment approaches and enhance relationships with participants and beyond.

Strategies to Support Retention of Clinical Research Participants (ONLINE)
Participants start making decisions about participation in research long before the first visit, and continue making decisions throughout recruitment, consent, and study participation. In this course, we will discuss the importance of strong retention to research in general, with a focus on relationship-building and other tools to build our chances of retaining participants from recruitment through the consent process and study participation.

Elective Courses

Participants choose 5 courses to complete. Note: Participants are required to choose five electives to complete the certificate program but may complete them all if desired. 

Engaging Partners in Clinical Research
With an increasing focus on patient-centeredness and engaging partners across and beyond the research enterprise, knowing how to identify and engage a variety of partners has become essential to the success of a comprehensive clinical research study. Understand the fundamental principles of partner engagement and learn how and when to identify and engage with partners in support of your research study.

Community and Stakeholder Engagement: Definitions, Principles, and Approaches (ONLINE)
According to the CDC, community-engaged research (CEnR) is “the process of working collaboratively with groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interests, or similar situations with respect to issues affecting their well-being.” CEnR can take on many forms and may include a wide variety of stakeholders, including hospitals and health systems, community organizations and leadership, community members, local institutions and agencies. You will learn the principles that undergird community-engaged research, the difference between CEnR and traditional health research, the spectrum of engagement opportunities, and how CEnR can support research for all.

Using Social Media for Study Recruitment: Questions to Consider (ONLINE)
This module will describe the purpose of recruitment using social media and provide an overview of questions to ask to help determine whether study teams should use social media as a recruitment tool. 

Telling the Story of Your Research
Learn how to communicate about research in a variety of situations to a variety of audiences. With an emphasis on developing your ability to make research inviting rather than overwhelming and use tools to develop engaging summaries of study results.

Electronic Tools to Support Participant Engagement and Recruitment
Learn about various tools available at Duke to support research participant engagement and recruitment. The facilitators will provide an overview of available tools and resources. The course will conclude with discussion time for attendees to share additional useful, creative tools that have worked to support their studies.

Elements of Effective eConsent Design (ONLINE)
With our new(ish) remote reality, many study teams have altered workflows to support conducting consent activities remotely. In this module, we will discuss the design and delivery of your electronic consents to ensure you are following principles of readability, human cognition, and learning (e.g. cognitive load, narration, coherence, signaling, redundancy, personalization, and accessibility). We will consider ways we can be more accessible with our methods of consenting participants

REDCap: eConsent and Multi-Language
This course covers how to use eConsent and Multi-Language for research at Duke using REDCap. You can use eConsent to conduct and record consent for remote participants, or for participants in clinic on tablets or other touchscreen devices.  Participants will be able to sign the consent form electronically with a stylus, mouse, or finger and submit it to the study team. Once the consent form is submitted, the participant will receive an email that includes a PDF attachment with a copy of their signed consent form.

The 5T’s: A Framework to Support Inclusion of Older Adults in Research
This course will provide a practical approach for including older adults in research. We will address case examples related to recruiting older adults, discuss the scope of the problem (why) and how the 5T’s were implemented, define the 5T’s, identify ways to apply the 5T’s to your studies, and discuss a potential application for other specific populations (e.g. rare disease, pediatric, etc.).

The ER&R Certificate is transforming from a manager-nominated, limited-space program into an on-demand learning opportunity. You can start anytime and learn at your own pace.

*Registration Note for Live Courses: Instructor-led courses offered via RPN/Research Wednesday are scheduled periodically throughout the year. If you do not see an open course in the LMS when you check, please keep an eye on the DOCR newsletter for registration announcements. New sessions will be announced in the DOCR Clinical Research Update newsletter as they become available, and there will be a note in the RPN or Research Wednesday announcement if a session is included in the ER&R curriculum.

Program Steering Team 

Jessica Cranfill
Manager, Education & Outreach 
Duke Office of Clinical Research 

Stephanie Freel, Ph.D.
Director, Clinical Research Education & Outreach
Duke Office of Clinical Research 

Jamie Roberts
Research Practice Manager
Duke Cancer Institute

Nicholas Eberlein
Project Planner
Recruitment Innovation Center (RIC)

Sierra Lindo
Project Planner
Recruitment Innovation Center (RIC)

Michael Musty
Research Program Leader II
Recruitment Innovation Center (RIC)

Dr. Nadine Barrett, Ph.D.
Senior Associate Dean, Research Access and Community Engagement, Wake Forest School of Medicine

Course Facilitators and Content Experts:

Karl Leif Bates
Executive Director of Research Communications
University Communications, Duke

Dr. Christopher Barrett Bowling, M.D.
Associate Professor of Medicine
Associate Professor in Population Health Sciences
Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development

Kenisha Bethea
Research Program Leader
CTSI Community Engaged Research Initiative

Ceci Chamorro
Associate Director, Research Operations - Data Team
CTSI Participant and Clinical Interactions (PCI) Core
Duke Office of Clinical Research 

Dr. Leonor Corsino, M.D.
Co-Director for the Duke CTSI- Community Engaged Research Initiative (CERI)
Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition
Associate Professor in Population Health Sciences
Associate Dean of Students Affairs/Duke School of Medicine
Associate Director, Duke School of Medicine Master of Biomedical Sciences

Dr. Rowena Dolor, M.D.
Professor of Medicine
Assistant Professor in Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences
Director, Duke Primary Care Research Consortium

Renee Leverty
Program Lead, DCRI Stakeholder Engagement, and DCRI Research Together
Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI)

Eve Marion
Clinical Trials Project Leader
Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI)

Leatrice Martin
Senior Program Coordinator
CTSI Community Engaged Research Initiative

Pam Maxson, Ph.D.
Chief of Staff and Strategy
Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute

Sabrena Mervin-Blake
Former Staff Director
CTSI Community Engaged Research Initiative 

Vincent Miller
Project Lead, New Technology
Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI)

Raquel Ruiz, M.B.A, M.A.Ed
Co-Director
CTSI Equity and Learning Health Communities Pillar

Brian Southwell, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor for Duke SSRI
Program Director, Science in the Public Sphere, RTI International
Duke Social Science Research Institute

Jennifer Thomas
Clinical Research Coordinator II
Duke Population Health Sciences

Below you'll find our past ER&R Graduates, along with their Clinical Research Unit and role at the time of nomination.

2024 Graduates

2023 Graduates

2022 Graduates

Fall 2021 Graduates

Spring 2021 Graduates

Fall 2020 Graduates