A question that’s interested me throughout my academic and professional career is: How do we change people’s behavior? In other words, what motivates some people to change and prevents–others from changing?

I got the hint of an answer–and my first exposure to what I now know as implementation science–while working on an honors project at Otterbein College, where in 2004 I earned a psychology degree. The project assessed elementary school-aged students’ performance on a repetitive computer task. 

Before they started the task, some of the students were given a choice: did they want an easy task, or a more difficult task? In reality, all of the students were randomly assigned an easy or more difficult task, but we wanted to see if the illusion of choice (which gave them a sense of control) impacted their commitment to sticking to their assignment, however tedious or challenging it was. The result? Students given a choice tended to perform better on their task (it’s also interesting to note that the effect was more pronounced in girls than in boys).

In 2008, I completed my Master of Public Health (MPH) degree at the University of Iowa in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health, and began working for the College of Public Health. I was still interested in behavior change, but my degree in public health provided me with a broader lens through which to think about people’s motivations. In my graduate training, I thought more about organizational change, social norms, and the array of barriers people might encounter when attempting to alter their own habits and behaviors.

Since coming to Iowa, I’ve held various roles on research teams, primarily working on grant-funded research. In recent years, I’ve had the opportunity to provide guidance and feedback to evaluation teams involved in spreading their evidence-based practice to new sites. 

I was formally introduced to the field of Implementation Science in late 2019, when I began working with Heather Reisinger at the Iowa City VA. But it’s clear looking back at my education and training that implementation science was often at work in some way, even when I didn’t know it by name.