Daniel Thiel

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Academic Specialist Teaching at Michigan State University

Background: Precision health offers the promise of advancing clinical care in data-driven, evidence-based, and personalized ways. However, complex data sharing infrastructures, for-profit (commercial) and nonprofit partnerships, and systems for data governance have been created with little attention to the values, expectations, and preferences of p...

Scholarship on newborn screening, dried bloodspot retention, and large population biobanking call consistently for improved public engagement. Communication with participants likely occurs only in the context of collection, consent, or notification, if at all. We ran an 11-week advertising campaign to inform Michigan Facebook users unlikely to know...

Biobanks have been heralded as essential tools for translating biomedical research into practice, driving precision medicine to improve pathways for global healthcare treatment and services. Many nations have established specific governance systems to facilitate research and to address the complex ethical, legal and social challenges that they pres...

Background: The interpersonal, dialogic features of social networking sites have untapped potential for public health communication. We ran a Facebook advertising campaign to raise statewide awareness of Michigan's newborn screening and biobanking programs. Objective: We ran a Facebook advertising campaign to stimulate public engagement on the c...

Bone Marrow Transplantation is a high quality, peer-reviewed journal covering all aspects of clinical and basic haemopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Background: Michigan's BioTrust for Health, a public health research biobank comprised of residual dried bloodspot (DBS) cards from newborn screening contains over 4 million samples collected without written consent. Participant-centric initiatives are IT tools that hold great promise to address the consent challenges in biobank research. Methods...

Background: The U.S. Institute of Medicine’s Report, Digital Infrastructure for the Learning Health System, calls for “weaving a strong trust fabric” among stakeholders, including the general public, to facilitate broad data linkage and sharing. The texture and quality of this “fabric” is understudied, particularly with respect to attitudes and bel...

Large population biobanks, important resources for genomic research, also present ethical challenges. The Michigan BioTrust for Health makes dried bloodspots (DBS) leftover from newborn screening, including ~4.5 million collected before 2010 without written consent, available for health research. Absent prospectively gathered consent and/or current...

Biobanks raise challenges for developing ethically sound and practicable consent policies. Biobanks comprised of dried bloodspots (DBS) left over from newborn screening, maintained for long-term storage, and potential secondary research applications are no exception. Michigan has been a leader in transforming its DBS collection, marketing its bioba...

Background/aims: Despite a broad call for biobanks to use social media, data is lacking regarding the capacity of social media tools, especially advertising, to engage large populations on this topic. Methods: We used Facebook advertising to engage Michigan residents about the BioTrust for Health. We conducted a low-budget (<USD 5,000), 26-day s...