Making true change in prevention science can be like climbing a mountain. First, you start out in the flats when you come up with a program you think will help children. You find a way of getting a test-case funded. You move into the foothills when lo and behold, the evaluation results are good. You publish. But at this point, you still have a last, treacherous pitch to climb. You have to get your research into the hands of policy makers, and have them act on it. Many are happy to stay in the foothills, never making that final push to get their results made into policy. Then, there are those like Kristin Moore. Moore has been climbing the mountain for over thirty years.

Moore credentials speak of a life dedicated to doing the most that she can for prevention science. She has published over 100 articles and books, and raised millions in research grants. And she has accomplished all this without being at a university. Moore has spent her career at not-for-profit, non-partisan research centers. She started at the Urban Institute and then moved to Child Trends where she became President. She wants to produce the evidence, but also wants to make sure the right people hear about it.

Her research interests – fatherhood, teen pregnancy, poverty, positive development, well-being trends, and evidence-based programs – have obvious policy relevance. They also make excellent copy for journalists. Not many academics would be comfortable making the front page of the Washington Post. But by the leading the news, Moore says, you can begin to win hearts and minds. In the late 1970s, Moore published research on the proportion of welfare recipients who were teen parents. Her research was featured in a front-page story in the Post with the headline ‘Billion Dollar Babies.’ It was about how much it cost the government to support girls who were having children. Her research featured prominently in the welfare debates of the 80s and 90s.

Active engagement with the media has been a hallmark of Moore’s career. It’s also something she has nurtured among her Child Trends’ staff. Her researchers are given media training. New hires are accompanied to interviews by senior researchers. They attend messaging sessions, where the team distils the key messages from forthcoming publications. These types of infrastructure supports, Moore says, are key to an organization that is in the business of research ‘translation.’

Moore couldn’t imagine giving an interview to a journalist without having talked about the key messages in advance. Preparation meant that a Time magazine journalist used her words for describing why many teen pregnancy prevention programs fail. Moore said the programs were ‘too late, too cheap and too brief,’and that became part of the thesis of the story. Preparation allows the researchers to drive the story, rather than having their science garbled by a journalist who might misinterpret the findings.

Moore joined Child Trends in 1982 when it was just three years old. It had been established by the Foundation for Child Development to conduct the first National Survey of Children. The organization did not set out specifically to influence decision-makers. It instead had more modest goals of monitoring children’s wellbeing. But under Moore’s leadership, the organization grew from a staff of eight to 56. It became the only independent research and policy center exclusively focused on improving the wellbeing of children in the US. Expanding the center has been Moore’s most gratifying achievement. She believes it provides an important service to the country, particularly where there are so many advocates promoting policy that has little or no evidence to back it up.

Unlike many academics, Moore believes that good science can and should be communicated with everyday language and that this won’t compromise the integrity of the research. One of the first ‘translation’ products from Child Trends was a ‘research brief’—a 6-8 page summary of research on a particular topic. The Center has now produced 65 such briefs, each of which is peer-reviewed to make sure quality is maintained.

The advent of the internet led her to develop new ways to get good research out to the wider world like the ‘data bank,’ fact sheets, and the ‘what works’ database. Her ‘what works’ database – an online resource about programs that do (and don’t) work to improve child well-being –has become an international resource for people who want to know whether they should invest in a particular practice or program. The web is now Child Trends’ primary vehicle for all communication efforts. Interestingly, the organization does not produce books because, Moore says, “Policy makers don’t have time”.

In 2006, Moore chose to step down as president of Child Trends. Carol Emig now runs the center. Moore hasn’t retired. She spends her time doing what she loves – research. In recognition of her contribution, the Board established a lecture series in her honor. Moore gets to choose the speaker, and always seeks out someone whose work intrigues her and who shares her passion for communicating effectively.

When asked to make a prediction about future areas for research and translation, she says she sees implementation research as a growing field. She also thinks the next generation of research on evidence-based programs will examine whether critical components vary from population to population. Integrated data systems is also an area for growth and she hopes that people learn to do a better job of sharing the data collected on child wellbeing at the international, national, and local level. Finally, she predicts that communities will increasingly demand data that was produced at the city or neighborhood level.

It takes a rare combination of talents to climb the mountain of prevention science and actually make a change, and it is perhaps unsurprising that so few are near the summit. While research and translation activity remains heavily skewed towards research, we should be asking – and please excuse the pun - how we find, nurture and develop more individuals like Moore, and organizations like Child Trends.