Nicole Onorato, Research Analyst II, VNSNY Center for Home Care Policy & Research
“What I do is help our principal investigators figure out the best ways to get things done.”
As a Research Analyst II with the VNSNY Research Center, Nicole helps the Center to be as productive as possible by devising the best ways to support different initiatives across the organization. “My role is to support the principal investigators in their research,” she says. “They come up with the big goals. What I do is help them figure out the best ways to get things done.” Recent activities Nicole has been involved in include helping interviewers transition from in-person interviews to phone interviews, and working with a team of researchers to develop and implement a survey aimed at gaining a better understanding of how COVID-19 has impacted Partners in Care HHAs.
The Research Center conducts randomized trials as well as secondary-data analysis projects, studying data VNSNY has already collected to come up with different insights. “These aren’t clinical trials,” explains Nicole. “We’re not looking into cures or vaccines or anything like that. But we are looking at things like long-term effects and population data—who’s affected, how they’re affected, that type of thing.”
Nicole is also a member of VNSNY’s Anti-Racism Employee Advisory Group, and speaks every year at Lehman College’s STEM program career panel to inform undergraduate students about careers in the STEM fields. She is a natural questioner, ever ready to go back to the drawing board to find a better, more efficient way of doing things. This hasn’t always been a plus, she admits with a grin. “Before VNSNY, I worked as a nurse’s aide in a hospital, and they didn’t always appreciate my asking why we were doing things the way we were.” She did gain from the experience, though. “It’s helped me see things from both sides,” she notes. “My research role gives me the opportunity to mix the things I learned in a more clinical setting with the more questioning way that my mind works.”
