The Oncofertility Consortium is a national, interdisciplinary initiative designed to explore the reproductive future of cancer survivors and consists of researchers and clinicians from five core centers and numerous participating clinics across the country. Academic & Research Technologies (A&RT), a department of Northwestern University Information Technology, has partnered with the NIH grant’s supported consortium to build solutions to the group’s complex web, media, and communication needs.
ART supports the project in its goal of bringing together a wide spectrum of experts, providing access to educational technologies and various multimedia resources. Due to the project’s nature of working cross-institutionally, the Oncofertility Consortium draws upon a broader and deeper collection of resources than a project restricted to a single physical site could.
NUAMPS has helped provide the web infrastructure to deliver the Oncofertility Consortium’s message to a variety of audiences through the web site oncofertility.northwestern.edu. Additionally, we help the group communicate internally across the significant geographical separation that challenges the project, through use of a combination of traditional videoconferencing, web-conferencing, web-based file sharing, and face-to-face conferencing,
The 2008 annual conference is held at Northwestern University’s Prentice Women’s Hospital, September 14-16. During this event many project participants meet physically, but the presentations are also broadcast via the web to those who cannot attend and archived as online media for later review.