Speaker 1: So MARS focuses on teaching pragmatic and practical skills for people who want to include folks who speak languages other than English in health research. We really prioritize small group work, networking, in-person interactions to create essentially a community for shared learning. We have amazing faculty in pediatrics and behavioral health, in language services, and so we hope they'll come away from the training feeling better prepared to include families who speak languages other than English in their next protocol. We limit enrollment to a small enough group that we can have hands-on small group work for the majority of the training period.

Speaker 2: The faculty at MARS are a interprofessional multidisciplinary group of folks who come from different fields such as linguistics, pediatrics, public health, behavioral health, nursing. Working together in a multidisciplinary group creates a really rich environment which enhances the learning because not everyone is going to have the same approach and we're going to learn together in our discussions, our conversations, sharing different opinions and approaches and viewpoints.

Speaker 1: We are offering scholarships to offset financial hardship that might be associated with things like needing to have extra child care or for folks who might need adaptive equipment. For example, if you need screen reading software to participate fully, you could use the scholarship funds for something like that. So participants will leave MARS with access to an electronic packet that includes key references, so foundational readings, some of the slide decks from the training. We also include a number of templates and worksheets that folks can use when they're planning out projects, things like sample Gantt charts or sample budgets. We also hope that folks will come away with a little bit of information about funding opportunities for folks who are looking to support these projects in the future.

Speaker 2: I think one of the big things for participants really is being a part of that community, having a network of people who are like-minded in their research in the sense that we are really putting forth that intent to be inclusive of participants who use other languages and to be able to access each other in this community setting. What we really want is to improve the science by being inclusive of greater proportions of our population, we will have more generalizable results. There is a sense in which we can be more in touch with folks in the community who may not be using the same outlets of communication as mainstream studies, and perhaps then there is also the push to communicate science results within the communities that are participating in that research. Another important aspect of why this is so important is that there are researchers who are bilingual or bicultural or who are part of a language community and they want to be able to collaborate with those communities, but maybe are in need of a little bit of methods guidance in order to do so.

Speaker 1: I think one of the most challenging things about being a researcher who really prioritizes inclusion of families who speak languages other than English is sometimes you don't have a large number of folks in your immediate environment who are experienced in those methods. And so we really try to make sure that folks can exchange information, stay in touch with each other through things like conference workshops and webinars, and try to build out that community so you have other folks of whom you can ask questions. Come to MARS, we'd love to see you. Probably the most rewarding part about this is meeting our trainees and seeing all the incredible work that they go on to do. So please apply now, we still have scholarships and spots available, but they are going fast.