Transitions
Jonathan’s high school graduation has me reflecting… I was supposed to be a teacher.
I had a plan, a fellowship, and a degree from Western Carolina. I student-taught in Haywood County, NC — high school mornings, elementary school afternoons — and loved it. The moment something clicks for another person is still one of my favorite things. Getting called across a room “Mademoiselle Hashimoto” is still a thrill — and felt like a multicultural miracle at the time.
A summer contract job changed my trajectory.
Manpower placed me at Glaxo, where Nancy Skinner, Doug Huber, and Joe Abdalla introduced me to something I hadn’t considered before: how patients and their healthcare professionals learn about serious disease. How they find their way to treatment. Nancy later connected me to Robert Butler and the team at Butler Communications, who were doing something genuinely new — taking clinical trial awareness to broadcast television and radio at a time when the industry was still relying on flyers and word of mouth. I learned to reach someone who doesn’t yet know a study — or that clinical research — exists.
Robert Butler, Penny McCann Pennington, and Bryan McIntyre gave me room to grow that had nothing to do with my job title or years of experience. In an entrepreneurial environment, you learn by doing — and they let me do everything. That foundation carried me through the Quintiles acquisition, through years of building recruitment and patient education programs, and eventually into corporate environments that opened doors to TransCelerate — where I helped develop the Study Participant Feedback Questionnaire and the Gratitude Toolkit alongside people who cared as deeply about this as I did.
Somewhere along the way, the rare disease community — particularly the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and their remarkable model of patient-driven venture philanthropy — showed me what it looks like when a community refuses to wait.
And then I enrolled in a clinical study myself. I read every word of the informed consent. I asked every question. And when I was done, I walked out carrying a 20-page consent document, a paper diary, and prep materials — in my hands, because a simple bag would have been way more than a nice-to-have.
I had spent years helping sponsors connect with patients. I had no idea what it felt like to be one.
This work is better with proximity — to the people in the waiting room, to the coordinators doing their best, to the teams who want to get it right.
The classroom looks different now — TEAMS calls, stakeholder meetings, workshops. But we’re all still learning, and the most important teachers in the room are the patients.
I’m grateful for this thirty-year journey — from connecting patients to research, to learning from and alongside them — that brought me to the work of translating patient insights into protocol-level action.
#ClinicalResearch #PatientExperience #PatientVoice #ClinicalTrials #SPFQ #LeadersOfTomorrow #LivedLens
