The Team Approach Posted on July 7, 2008 Howard J. Aizenstein (bio) talks about how team approach to research helps with recruitment.

I've paired up with Dr. Reynolds here at the Late Life Depression Center in Pittsburgh, and the recruitment is done primarily through the Late Life Depression Intervention Research Center. And I associate my imaging studies with his center so that I basically outsource the recruitment and do it by having a nice collaboration with the pure intervention researchers.

So there's a large center that does intervention research. They characterize the subjects very well, go out into the community and recruit them, and then I do my imaging studies where they'll call us when a new subject comes in and my research assistant will call that subject and ask if they'd be interested in participating in an additional imaging component of the study.

And most subjects are interested in it. They recognize that the brain plays an important role in depression and that if they can come in and get a simple imaging study, it won't delay their treatment and it'll give us additional information to try and improve treatment in the future.

So I'm a little different than a lot of researchers who will try and do all the pieces themselves, and I've really liked having this team approach, where I'll offer and have my strength be the imaging and then collaborate with another center that does the recruitment.

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