Mel Hardman is a Certified Clinical Research Professional (CCRP) with over 15 years of progressive healthcare leadership and clinical research experience who has found her niche in site and investigator engagement, clinical trial patient recruitment and retention, protocol evaluation activities. Mel spends a lot of her time strategizing ways to improve diversity in clinical trials, closing the patient to science gap, and increasing awareness and visibility of clinical trials in communities of color. She has also consulted with start-up companies to improve their knowledge of optimizing recruitment funnels for technical platforms. In this episode we discuss the complexity of protocol amendments, participant enrollment challenges and their downstream effects, and true community engagement.