How does knowledge become action?
Every year, researchers generate extraordinary amounts of knowledge about health, education, environmental systems, technology, organizations, and society. Yet producing knowledge and putting knowledge to use are very different accomplishments.
Research must often travel across disciplinary languages, professional cultures, institutions, technologies, media environments, and communities before it can influence a consequential decision. Along the way, evidence is selected, summarized, visualized, interpreted, questioned, reframed, and combined with other forms of knowledge. The challenge is therefore rarely simply how do we distribute research? The more important question is:
How does evidence become understandable, credible, relevant, and usable to the people who need to make decisions with it?
My research examines research translation as a strategic communication problem. I am interested in how knowledge moves beyond journals and conferences to influence public understanding, professional practice, organizational decision-making, policy, education, and community action. The goal is not simply to make research more accessible. It is to improve the pathway from evidence to understanding to decision to action.
A Design Ecology Perspective
Knowledge does not travel unchanged. When research moves from a laboratory to a journal article, from a technical report to a public meeting, from scientific findings to professional guidance, or from academic scholarship to news and social media, it enters an ecology of people, technologies, institutions, cultural assumptions, communication channels, and competing information. Each interaction affects meaning.
Technical terminology may become everyday language. Visualizations emphasize some relationships while minimizing others. Organizations interpret findings through institutional priorities. Journalists frame research for particular publics. Practitioners compare formal evidence with experience. Communities assess new information in relation to local knowledge, values, constraints, and previous encounters with institutions.
Translation therefore involves much more than simplification. From a Design Ecology perspective, effective research translation requires designing communication systems that make knowledge more usable while preserving the evidence, uncertainty, context, and limitations necessary for responsible interpretation. That creates both a strategic and an ethical challenge:
How can we make complex knowledge easier to use without making it misleadingly simple?
From Research Findings to Usable Knowledge
This question has been present throughout my scholarship. My doctoral research generated detailed evidence about potential pathogen-transfer pathways associated with everyday poultry-care practices. But identifying transfer patterns was only one part of the problem. The practical question was what those findings meant for the people expected to reduce risk.
A fluorescent trace on footwear, a tool, an egg-collection process, or a nesting box becomes useful evidence only when it helps researchers, animal-health professionals, extension educators, product designers, or flock keepers understand where intervention is possible and what action should follow. That translation problem now drives several manuscripts emerging from the dissertation. Together, these projects ask a larger question that extends well beyond backyard poultry:
What forms of communication help people translate abstract or technical evidence into decisions they can actually make within everyday environments?
Beyond Dissemination
Research translation is sometimes treated as the final step of scholarship. Conduct the study. Publish the article. Present the findings. Write a summary. But dissemination and translation are not the same thing. Dissemination moves information. Translation creates the conditions under which information can become useful knowledge.
That process may require researchers to reconsider language, visualization, context, delivery, timing, audience assumptions, or even the original framing of the problem. It also requires listening.
Practitioners identify constraints that researchers may not encounter in controlled studies. Communities contribute local and experiential knowledge. Professionals understand workflows and institutional realities. Decision-makers must balance evidence against resources, competing priorities, legal requirements, political environments, and incomplete information. Knowledge therefore does not simply move outward from experts toward users. It is interpreted, tested, contextualized, and sometimes transformed through use. This makes research translation inherently relational.
Translation as a Scholarly Practice
My own work has consistently moved across multiple forms of scholarly and professional communication. My record includes peer-reviewed research articles, four books, refereed conference presentations, invited lectures and keynotes, creative scholarship, intellectual property, interdisciplinary grants and contracts, course development, and applied community and organizational work. These forms serve different audiences and purposes.
A peer-reviewed article allows detailed theoretical and methodological scrutiny. A conference presentation creates opportunities for disciplinary exchange. A book can synthesize complex material for sustained professional or educational use. A visual framework may communicate relationships that prose alone cannot convey. A course translates scholarship into structured learning experiences. An applied partnership tests whether ideas remain useful outside the environment in which they were developed.
I have also contributed substantively to 23 grants, contracts, and awards totaling more than $1.52 million, frequently working within interdisciplinary settings where successful collaboration required people from different professional and disciplinary backgrounds to establish shared language and shared objectives. Across these forms of work, translation is not an activity that occurs after research. It is part of how I understand scholarship itself.
Teaching as Research Translation
Teaching has also shaped my thinking about public understanding. Across my academic career, I have developed more than 50 distinct undergraduate and graduate courses and taught more than 19,000 learners through face-to-face, hybrid, and online environments. Effective teaching requires many of the same skills as effective research translation.
Expert knowledge must be reorganized around what another person needs to understand. Complex ideas must be decomposed without distorting them. Abstract principles need meaningful examples. Visual and verbal information must reinforce rather than compete with one another. Learners need opportunities to apply knowledge rather than merely encounter it. Most importantly, communication must begin with an understanding of the audience.
My scholarship on virtual learning environments, digital drawing interfaces, learning spaces, professional commitment, intercultural competence, and cultural intelligence has similarly examined relationships among information, environments, learning, technology, and human behavior. These experiences reinforce a principle that carries directly into my current research:
Understanding is not produced by exposure to information. It is produced through interaction among information, context, experience, and interpretation.
Visualizing Complexity
Design and visualization play an important role in this research program because many of the problems researchers study are difficult to perceive directly. Disease transmission is invisible. Complex systems contain relationships that cannot easily be understood from isolated statistics. Risk is often probabilistic rather than observable.
Organizational processes unfold across time, people, technologies, and locations. Environmental problems operate at scales that exceed everyday experience. Visual communication can make these relationships more legible—but visualization also introduces choices about framing, emphasis, abstraction, and representation.
My background in design research and environmental symbology therefore informs my approach to research translation. I am interested not simply in making information attractive, but in understanding how visual, spatial, and information design affect interpretation. Visualization is therefore both a communication tool and an ethical responsibility.
Research Themes
My work in research translation and public understanding explores questions such as:
- How can complex evidence be translated without compromising scientific integrity?
- What determines whether different publics regard evidence as credible?
- How do prior experience, identity, culture, and institutional trust influence interpretation?
- How can uncertainty be communicated without creating either false confidence or unnecessary confusion?
- What role do visualization and information design play in making complex systems understandable?
- How can invisible or abstract phenomena be made meaningful?
- Why does knowledge sometimes fail to produce action?
- How can researchers collaborate more effectively with practitioners and communities?
- How do organizations incorporate new evidence into established practices?
- What prevents useful research from influencing policy, professional practice, or public behavior?
- How can interdisciplinary teams establish shared understanding across different forms of expertise?
- How should communication change when the audience must make a decision rather than simply learn a fact?
- What ethical responsibilities accompany the simplification and strategic framing of scientific evidence?
These questions draw upon strategic communication, science and environmental communication, visual communication, instructional design, human-computer interaction, stakeholder engagement, systems thinking, and research translation.
Public Understanding, Trust & Uncertainty
Research translation becomes especially important when evidence is incomplete, evolving, contested, or consequential. Scientific communication is sometimes imagined as a straightforward deficit problem: experts possess knowledge that publics lack, so better communication should close the gap.
In practice, people interpret research through much more complicated systems. They consider the source. They compare findings with previous experience. They encounter competing claims. They evaluate whether institutions appear trustworthy. They ask whether recommendations are feasible. They interpret information through cultural values and social relationships.
This means that public understanding cannot be separated from trust, context, and experience. It also means that researchers and institutions must communicate uncertainty carefully. Acknowledging uncertainty is essential to scientific integrity, but uncertainty communicated without context can be interpreted as ignorance, institutional weakness, or evidence that all claims are equally plausible.
One important challenge for strategic science communication is therefore helping people understand not only what researchers know, but also how they know it, how confident they are, what remains uncertain, and what decisions the available evidence reasonably supports.
Interdisciplinary Translation
Research must also move across disciplinary boundaries. Many of the problems that interest me—environmental health, One Health, community resilience, food systems, technology, public trust, and risk—cannot be addressed within a single field. Yet interdisciplinary collaboration introduces its own communication problems. Different disciplines may define the same word differently. They value different forms of evidence, use different methodological traditions, operate at different scales, and prioritize different outcomes.
My scholarship and grant activity have involved collaborations across design, forestry, environmental science, public and animal health, education, technology, and community engagement. Those experiences have made interdisciplinary translation an important part of my broader research agenda. Before interdisciplinary teams can solve problems together, they frequently must first develop enough shared understanding to recognize what each discipline knows, what it assumes, what it can contribute, and where its limitations lie. Translation therefore operates not only between experts and publics. It also operates among experts.
From Discovery to Decision
Research translation becomes most consequential when someone must make a decision. A homeowner deciding whether to change a biosecurity practice. A community preparing for an environmental hazard. A practitioner considering new evidence. An administrator deciding whether to change an institutional process. A policymaker evaluating competing recommendations. A researcher designing the next study.
In each situation, the useful question is not merely, Does this person understand the information? It is: Does this person understand the information well enough to use it responsibly within the decision they actually face?
This distinction shifts communication away from awareness as the primary outcome. Awareness may be necessary, but evidence-informed decision-making also requires relevance, credibility, context, feasibility, and an understanding of consequences. My work therefore approaches research translation as part of a larger sequence – a process that is iterative rather than linear. Decisions create new evidence. Implementation reveals constraints. Communities and practitioners identify questions researchers had not anticipated. Those insights can then reshape future scholarship.
Applied Translation & Public Engagement
My career has moved repeatedly between academic research and applied environments. I have worked across higher education, interdisciplinary research, private enterprise, workforce development, local government, nonprofit and community-serving organizations, and public-private partnerships. These settings have reinforced an important observation: information becomes valuable only when it can function within the system in which people are expected to use it.
An excellent recommendation that conflicts with organizational workflow may never be implemented. A technically accurate report that decision-makers cannot interpret may have little influence. A public-health message that ignores the practical circumstances of its audience may produce awareness without behavior change. A research finding that never leaves disciplinary communication networks may never reach the community capable of benefiting from it.
Research translation therefore requires more than good writing. It requires audience research, listening, collaboration, contextual understanding, visualization, strategic communication, and attention to implementation.
Why This Matters
Society faces increasingly complex decisions involving environmental change, public health, artificial intelligence, food systems, disaster preparedness, education, technology, and institutional trust. In many of these contexts, decisions must be made before perfect information is available.
At the same time, people operate within an information environment characterized by extraordinary abundance. Scientific findings compete with news coverage, organizational messaging, social media, personal experience, misinformation, professional advice, and rapidly generated digital content. The challenge is no longer simply providing access to information. It is helping people evaluate evidence, understand uncertainty, recognize credible sources, connect knowledge to context, and make defensible decisions. Research translation therefore has implications far beyond academic impact. It affects whether scientific discovery contributes meaningfully to public life.
Current Areas of Inquiry
My current work approaches research translation through several interconnected areas:
Strategic research communication
Examining how audience, objective, context, framing, messenger, medium, and timing influence whether research becomes useful beyond disciplinary communities.
Science and environmental communication
Studying how scientific evidence—particularly evidence concerning health, environment, agriculture, and risk—is understood by different publics.
Risk visualization and information design
Investigating how complex, probabilistic, or invisible phenomena can be represented in ways that improve understanding while preserving appropriate uncertainty.
Evidence-informed decision-making
Exploring the conditions under which research influences professional, organizational, community, and public decisions.
Public understanding and institutional trust
Examining how credibility, previous experience, cultural context, and institutional relationships shape the reception of expert knowledge.
Knowledge mobilization and organizational learning
Studying how evidence moves through institutions and becomes incorporated into routine practice, policy, and decision-making.
Interdisciplinary communication
Investigating how researchers and professionals establish shared understanding across different disciplinary languages, assumptions, methods, and forms of expertise.
Education and instructional communication
Exploring how complex knowledge is structured, represented, and experienced in ways that support meaningful learning and application.
Community and stakeholder engagement
Examining translation as a reciprocal process through which researchers, practitioners, organizations, and communities contribute different forms of knowledge.
Ethics of research translation
Investigating the responsibilities associated with framing, simplifying, visualizing, contextualizing, and strategically communicating evidence.
Together, these areas contribute to my broader Design Ecology framework by examining how knowledge moves through interconnected human, organizational, technological, and environmental systems.
Looking Forward
The pace of knowledge production is accelerating. Artificial intelligence is changing how information is generated, summarized, discovered, and evaluated. Scientific problems increasingly cross disciplinary boundaries. Organizations and communities must make consequential decisions within crowded and contested information environments. Public confidence in institutions cannot simply be assumed.
Under these conditions, producing more information is not enough. We need better systems for helping people determine what evidence means, why it should be trusted, how certain it is, how it applies to their circumstances, and what responsible action might follow.
My research seeks to develop frameworks and practices that help researchers, organizations, practitioners, and communities move beyond the dissemination of information toward the creation of shared understanding and informed action. Ultimately, I believe the purpose of research is not only to expand what we know.
It is to expand what people and communities are able to understand, decide, and do together.