2026 Conference
September 25-26, 2024 | Minneapolis, Minnesota
Chaired by Mónica Pérez Jolles | Student Co-Chair: Hyunjin Kang
Get excited about the SIRC 2026 conference! This year, we are coming together around the theme “Building Communities to Translate Evidence into Practice and Practice into Evidence”.
The conference welcomes researchers, practitioners, community partners, patient leaders, advocates, and students/trainees to connect, learn, and reflect on how implementation science can build stronger bridges among them. By bringing together diverse perspectives, SIRC 2026 will create spaces to explore how evidence can better serve communities, and how community and practice-based knowledge can strengthen the evidence we generate. We are offering diverse session formats that include 30-min slams, student/trainee fishbowls, highlighted sessions, and a spectacular group of distinguished and diverse keynote speakers.
Keynote Speaker Session Representing Patient and Community Leadership and Advocacy
SIRC is honored to feature a keynote speaker session highlighting the essential role of patient and community leadership in advancing implementation science. This session will center the voices of leaders whose work demonstrates how advocacy, lived experience, community partnership, and systems change can shape more equitable and responsive approaches to translating evidence into practice, and practice into evidence.
Gwen Darien is a longtime patient advocate who has played leadership roles in some of the country’s preeminent nonprofit organizations. As chief patient engagement officer at Patient Advocate Foundation, Darien leads programs that link PAF’s direct patient service programs to system change initiatives to improve access to equitable, affordable, quality health care.
As a four-time cancer survivor herself, Darien champions placing patients at the center of health system change, whether it is for research, public policy or direct services. Darien has held national leadership roles in patient engagement, including serving as past chair of PCORI’s Patient Engagement Advisory Panel and as a member of the National Cancer Policy Forum of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.
Alma McCormick is a member of the Crow Nation and a trusted community leader and activist for improved health and wellness. In 1996, she began working with the Montana Cancer Control Program to address cancer outreach and advocacy among the Crow women achieving a breakthrough in cancer awareness in the Crow community. From 2001 to the present, she has been working in collaboration with Montana State University- Bozeman to successfully address other health issues important to the Crow people by utilizing traditional cultural strengths and values combined with community-based participatory research methods. Alma’s strong passion for her work in community outreach stems from her personal experience of losing a young twin daughter to neuroblastoma cancer in 1985.
Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Dr. Rogério M. Pinto spent more than a decade in clinical and community practice. With a degree in biological sciences and in social work, his dissemination and implementation research applies community-based participatory research principles and best practices to broadcast the voices of oppressed individuals and groups in the United States and in Brazil. His National Institutes of Health research underscores the positive impact of community building and interprofessional collaboration on the delivery of evidence-based practices and on the development of practice-based evidence. Pinto conducts art-based scholarly research, using autoethnographic methods, visual art, drama and performance. His latest book, “Freire and Drama ‘Marília’, a Play” focuses on anti-oppression and healing in the arts.
Dr. Purtle is a mental health policy researcher and implementation scientist. His work examines questions such as how the implementation of policies “on the books” can be improved in practice, how research evidence can be effectively communicated to policymakers and is used in policymaking processes, and how social and political contexts affect mental health policymaking and policy implementation. He also studies population-based approaches and financing models for mental health services. His work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He currently leads a NIDA-funded study analyzing social media data to identify audience segments of state legislators who conceptualize substance use issues in different ways and experimentally testing different ways of communicating evidence to legislators.
Jay Brown (they/she) is passionate about ARCC’s mission to catalyze and support research partnerships driven by and rooted in Chicagoland communities’ unique assets and experiences to achieve health justice. Jay has over two decades of experience building and supporting community leadership and partnership in research at project, institutional, and multi-institutional levels through infrastructure development, partnership brokering, capacity-building, seed grant funding, and advocacy. Jay is on faculty at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Jay recently completed their term as Chair for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s Patient Engagement Advisory Panel, was a Gold Humanism Honor Society inductee, and a Chicago United for Equity Racial Justice Fellow.
Sherida Moorison works collaboratively with community and academic partners to advance community-driven research and strengthen pathways for impactful engagement in translational science. With more than 30 years of experience founding and leading nonprofit and community-based initiatives in the Chicagoland area, Sherida brings deep expertise in coalition-building, leadership development, and community partnerships. She is also a trained Human-Centered Design practitioner and has facilitated design processes with community organizations, institutions, and cross-sector partnerships to develop innovative programs and initiatives. Sherida’s work is grounded in a longstanding commitment to community leadership and ensuring that research is informed by the lived experience, priorities, and wisdom of the communities it seeks to serve.
Local Panel Showcasing D&I Research and Practice in Minnesota
Dr. Chomilo’s work focuses on advancing racial and health equity by centering marginalized communities in health policy and holding health systems accountable for creating more equitable opportunities for children & families to thrive. He continues to practice as a General Pediatrician with Park Nicollet Health Services/HealthPartners and prior to working for the State he was also an internal medicine hospitalist. He was previously tapped by Governor Tim Walz to serve as the State of Minnesota’s COVID-19 vaccine equity director and as a Senior Advisor on Equity to the Minnesota Commissioner of Health. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School and an Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute.
Formerly an associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, Adriano continues to co-pursue a research agenda with immigrant and migrant community partners to position Latin American asylum seekers in strength for political action and advocacy to address harms inflicted by the U.S. immigration system. Adriano also currently serves as a co-director of the American Political Science Association’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research.
Frank Jadwin leads implementation of CoCM under a SAMHSA-funded initiative in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Human Services. With more than 15 years of experience spanning clinical practice, behavioral health operations, and health system leadership, his work centers on helping organizations develop sustainable, team-based approaches that expand access to behavioral health care. In addition to his work across Minnesota, Frank has contributed to national conversations on integrated care through training, consultation, advocacy, and collaboration with healthcare leaders and policymakers. He is especially passionate about connecting frontline clinical realities with practical, scalable solutions that strengthen care for patients, providers, and communities.
Dr. Choy-Brown’s work aims to bridge the research-to-practice gap and improve access to high quality mental health care. Her research interests are in implementation science, clinical supervision, and community mental health services. Informed by over a decade of practice experience, a key focus of her research is building the evidence for clinical supervision strategies that can yield routine anti-oppressive, recovery-oriented, and evidence-informed service experiences in public mental health care. Her work has examined supervision as an implementation strategy to integrate a range of efficacious interventions, including person-centered care planning, assertive community treatment, interpersonal therapy adolescent skills training, and measurement-based care.
Dr. Ackland’s research interests are in the evaluation of multi-level factors that affect the implementation of guideline-concordant treatments for mental health conditions. She has served as PI, Co-PI, and Co-I on several federally-funded studies including several clinical trials that are aligned with Veterans Health Administration high-priority areas. Specifically, these studies have 1) examined the implementation of treatments recommended in clinical practice guidelines for depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and opioid use disorder and/or 2) tested the effectiveness of interventions or methods to increase engagement in or provision of these treatments. Dr. Ackland is also the Director of CCDOR’s Implementation and Dissemination Core and is a VA leader in implementation science and qualitative methods.
Dr. Timothy Beebe serves as Deputy Director of the UMN Center for Learning Health System Sciences, a collaboration between the UMN medical school and the school of public health, focused on identifying challenges in healthcare delivery, gathering evidence on the challenge, implementing a change, and evaluating that change by collecting data on its impact. He also leads the Minnesota Learning Health System Mentored Career Development Program, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, that trains and mentors scientists to conduct embedded patient-centered research to improve healthcare.
Dr. Buchanan is an implementation scientist whose research focuses on improving the quality of healthcare and access to it for parents and families through integrating mental and physical health, substance use, and social support. Making more visible the importance of relational health, including parent-child and family relationships and the clinician-patient relationship to clinicians, healthcare workers, and policymakers requires engagement with everyone involved. Through this work, she also contributes to the implementation science field itself to bridge the gap between research and practice.
Highlighted Session: Funding Community-Engaged/Centered Implementation Science in a Changing World
The funding landscape is changing. Come and learn about research funding options and updates directly from representatives from three leading organizations and institutes: Patient-Centered Research Institute (PCORI), the National Institute of Mental Health, and the William T Grant Foundation.
Speakers: May Green (PCORI), Vidya Vedham (NIMH), and Kimberly DuMont (William T. Grant)
Highlighted Session: Roundtable - How Far Can We Scale Implementation Science?
This round table will consider whether there is a limit to how much we can scale high quality implementation support. Discussants will describe what infrastructure supports are needed to sustain implementation efforts at scale, and how to maintain a focus on equitable access when scaling evidence-based programs.
Discussants:
- Shannon Wiltsey Stirman, Professor at Stanford and Co-Director of the CREATE Center, a NIMH ALACRITY center
- Brian Bumbarger, Director of Implementation Science and Strategy at Florida State University’s Florida Center for Prevention Research (FCPR)
- Sarah Fleury, Managing Director of Behavioral Health at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island
Moderator: Margaret Crane
Highlighted Session: Practice-Informed Research Agenda Setting: What Implementation Support Practitioners Need Researchers to Know
This interactive highlighted session will bring together implementation support practitioners, intermediaries, funders, and researchers to identify critical practice-informed priorities for future implementation research. Through a facilitated discussion, participants will share pressing challenges, unanswered questions, and opportunities where research could better support real-world implementation efforts. The session will generate a preliminary practice-informed research agenda intended to inform future scholarship, strengthen researcher-practitioner partnerships, and advance SIRC’s commitment to bridging research and practice.
Member pricing:
Early registration (ends on July 24): $525.00 for professionals; $300.00 for students
Regular registration (July 25-August 10): $625.00 for professionals; $350.00 for students
Non-member pricing:
Early registration (ends on July 24): $690.00 for professionals; $405.00 for students
Regular registration (July 25-August 10): $790.00 for professionals; $455.00 for students
Late registration (starting August 11th) and cancellations:
A 10% late registration fee will be applied to members and non-members if registration occurs starting August 11th
$100.00 cancellation fee will be applied for professionals
$50.00 cancellation fee will be applied for students
Sponsors & Partners
For sponsorship opportunities, please contact: finance@sircimplementation.org
Thank you to our generous sponsors:
SIRC Collaborator sponsoring a conference networking event, practitioner award, and dissemination initiatives
Thank you also to our partners: