Barbara Tafuto, Ph.D.

Barbara’s graduate research produced a framework for evaluating research networking systems that has since been applied internationally, including to the Netherlands’ national research portal. That early work shaped a career spent building similar infrastructure at Rutgers: as co-lead of the NJ ACTS Workforce Development Core, she co- developed the Clinical Research Coordinator Badge Program, developed CTSA Search Solutions, a search engine aggregating program content across more than 60 NIH-funded academic medical centers, and a REDCap-based tool that maps course objectives to program competencies for accreditation.

She also mentors Doctor of Health Informatics students in postmarketing observational research, training them to understand and leverage available data resources to make discoveries in fields such as drug safety that contribute to existing treatment options and guidelines, and currently applies large language models to health-related higher education.

Her goal is that this work contributes to: (1) stronger, more comparable infrastructure for training and evaluating clinical and translational research workforce and programs; and (2) the effective translation of research findings into practice.