How to Keep Your Trainee Tables So Your Grants Manager Will Love You

Doing Research / Grants & Funding

You may not have trainees yet, but when you do, you’ll need to start keeping track of them.  At some point, you’ll be asked to serve as a mentor or otherwise be involved with an institutional training grant.  NIH has specific characteristics and outcomes they want to know about your trainees, and they want it in particular formats. It’s more effective to track these from the start, with regular updates, than it is to scramble to complete rosters during the few weeks (or days) you have before the PI wants the tables back.

In recent years, I’ve been in charge of training tables for a K12 and a CTSA KL2 and TL1 program, all of which were funded.  The CTSA grant included more than 60 participating faculty who needed to have information in the training tables.  Here’s what folks like me have to fill out, and how you can help us by just keeping certain information in your records of trainees, and keeping it in a certain format.

Look at this. Doesn’t it make you want to cry?

The current training tables have several pages of very dense, very detailed instructions.  One option for tracking your trainees is to keep copies of these tables for yourself.  This is great if you get a request to send in pre-filled tables, because you don’t have to do anything but forward what you keep for yourself.  However, the information is scattered across multiple tables in combinations that don’t make a lot of intuitive sense.

Another option is to keep everything about your trainees in a spreadsheet or Word table, or even a REDCap database.  This lets you update information easily, keep an abbreviated version in your CV, and quickly respond to requests for information in new combinations or formats.  (Perhaps the PI is putting together a supplemental table to highlight something extraordinary about the program, such as number of Hispanics trainees or proportion who earned K awards within ten years of graduation.)  The NIH tables get redesigned from time to time as well, so this avoids having to reformat all your data when the tables change.

Here’s a template I developed that includes all the information currently being asked about mentors’ trainees.  Fill out all these cells, and there’s nothing a PI can throw at you that you won’t be able to give them.

Citizenship status. Know it. Write it down. Bathe in love from your grants administrators.

What kind of information should you keep?

Well, frankly, if nothing else, please note their citizenship status when they were your trainee.  NIH tracks everything based on “training grant eligibility,” which means US citizen or permanent resident.  Every single table in the ones linked above requires knowledge of whether the trainees in it were training grant eligible or not.  This is the most frequently missing information when I collect training table data, and it probably has the greatest effect on how the tables are arranged and filled out.

That aside, to start with, you’ll need to know:

  • Which trainees were predoctoral, broken into current and graduated
  • Which trainees were postdoctoral, broken into current and completed training (frequently this includes early career faculty for whom you’ve served as a mentor, but occasionally the grant’s table czar only wants true postdocs, so it doesn’t hurt to keep these categories separate as well)
  • Which of your trainees continued in research or related careers,* again broken into pre- and postdoc
  • The month and year each trainee started and ended their training with you
  • Their position at the time they started with you (i.e., resident, grad student, postdoc, instructor, assistant professor…) and their home department
  • Their names! Seems obvious, but there’s one table where I can’t double-count trainees.  If you and your colleague both mentor someone and count that person as your trainee, I need to cross-reference the list of names and only count that person once.  NIH likes middle initials, so be sure and get one from your trainees who have middle names.

* Per the instructions: “Research-related positions generally require a doctoral degree and may include activities such as teaching, administering research or higher education programs, science policy, and technology transfer.” You only have four options: research-intensive (academic PI, industry researcher), research-related (as above), further training, and other (went into private practice, left science totally).

You also need to keep track of the following characteristics:

  • Was/is each trainee supported by any HHS training award (such as a T32, F30, K12, etc.)?
  • Was/is each trainee eligible to be supported by a training grant (this means were they a citizen or permanent resident at the time they were your mentee)?
  • Most recent prior institution and degree, including bachelor’s, master’s, and any kind of doctoral degrees, and the year that degree was earned
  • Any degrees earned while they were your trainee and the year earned
  • Their project title or research interest
  • Demographic information that is only ever reported in aggregate. This should be self-reported by the trainee. (You might just pass around your spreadsheet and have them fill it in.)
    • Race: Current categories are American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, Black or African American, White, More Than One Race, and Unknown or Not Reported
    • Ethnicity: Hispanic/Latino or not Hispanic/Latino
    • Gender: Male, Female, Unknown or Not Reported
    • Disability: The official definition is having a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; this can include mobility, vision, or hearing impairments, mental or learning disabilities, or conditions such as chronic diseases.
    • Disadvantaged:
      1. Individuals who come from a family with an annual income below established low-income thresholds. These thresholds are based on family size, published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census; adjusted annually for changes in the Consumer Price Index; and adjusted by the Secretary for use in all health professions programs. The Secretary periodically publishes these income levels online.
      2. Individuals who come from an educational environment such as that found in certain rural or inner-city environments that has demonstrably and directly inhibited the individual from obtaining the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to develop and participate in a research career.

Publications

Yes, you now need to keep track of every paper every trainee ever published that was based on work done in your lab.  Start now and it’s much less painful than doing it for dozens of trainees years down the road.

  • Different PIs will want different citation styles, so keep your records in the style most comfortable to you. I promise you will not be the only participating faculty member whose publication records have to be reformatted into the style of choice.
  • Remember that every publication accepted after April 2007 that used any NIH grant money for the research involved must have a PMCID to be listed. Getting PMCIDs is beyond the scope of this blog, but go here to learn how you get one.
  • Please, please bold the trainee’s name in the citation. And if you have multiple trainees on one paper, I beg you to copy that bad boy into the record of every one of those trainees rather than assuming one suffices for all.  I have to make a separate row for each trainee on the publications table, so this helps me keep things straight.
  • If a trainee didn’t have any publications from their time in your lab, or is too new to have publications, state “No Publications,” followed by one of these official NIH reasons: New Entrant, Leave of Absence, Change of Research Supervisor, Left Program, or Other.
  • Technically we’re only supposed to report publications for training grant-eligible trainees (US citizen or permanent resident), but on my grants we usually create a supplemental table for publications by non-citizens. It’s worth it to keep track of them all.  Because you have also recorded their citizenship status, you or the staff member compiling the tables can easily figure out who should go where.

These are optional, because they are only reported for applicants to a training program rather than all mentees, but they can be incredibly helpful if this is a new program being proposed and the “applicant pool” consists of the mentors’ trainees:

  • For predocs, their undergrad GPA and months of prior full-time research experience
  • For postdocs, their number of publications and number of first-author publications before they became your trainee
  • For both, what funding they were on each year of their training, including which NIH institute the grant came from. For example, an NHLBI T32 gets listed as “HL T32.”  You can also put down that they were supported by your R01 or startup funds, foundation grants, RA positions, scholarships, or other funding.

Outcomes

PLEASE KEEP TRACK OF WHAT YOUR TRAINEES DO WHEN THEY LEAVE YOU.  Not only do the tables require certain information, but you or whoever’s writing the grant can brag about them in the text!  At minimum, keep track of and update:

  • Their current position, institution, and department (or equivalent for industry jobs)
  • Whether they can currently be classified as “research-intensive,” “research-related,” “further training,” or “other”

This goes into the optional but very helpful bin above: External grant funding they have received since they left you, especially grants where they are PI, but also ones where they’re a Co-I or another role.  The current format requires the year received, role on the grant, and, for NIH, the institute.  It looks like this: HL K23/PI/2014. Or GM R01/Co-I/2017. Or CA P01/Staff Scientist/2013.

Outcomes will need updating at least once a year.  Make sure you get a working email address for your trainees when they leave you!

Use this template and make it easy!

This sounds like a lot, I know.  (Believe me, after compiling it for 60+ faculty in the year when the training tables changed formats and asked for a lot of new information, I know.)  But much of it can be done when the trainee enters your lab, and then you don’t need to do much to it besides a once a year email.  Staff can also do much of the work, especially if you need to catch up on data from past trainees.  And when you submit your tables?  Ask for a copy of them back with all the formatting and filling in of blanks the PI’s staff did.  This will save you a lot of time for the next request.

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How To Survive The Interview You Didn’t Know Was Coming

Communication / Doing Research

Daily news reporting is a tough and thankless task. A reporter can write a well thought out, hard-hitting story on a Thursday and, when they wake up Friday morning, the page is blank again and the editor is asking “What have you done for me lately?”

Because TV stations and newspapers are in need of new and relevant content every day, a lot of what we do in the VUMC Department of News and Communications consists of finding sources and stories very quickly. Our researchers are frequently asked to comment on health-related topics even if they are not directly involved.

When Michael Jackson died, cardiologist Dr. Keith Churchwell was on CNN International within minutes to discuss Mr. Jackson’s reported cardiac arrest and what that could mean for a person of his age.

When a nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak was first discovered, and then tied to a dirty drug compounding pharmacy by a Vanderbilt physician, Dr. April Pettit was on the phone being interviewed by both the New York Times and the Tennessean in a very short timeframe.

Researchers and physicians can communicate effectively with their audience, even on short notice, if they are able to follow a few simple tips when being interviewed by the media.

Remember, reporters are looking for short, concise, easy-to-understand quotes and a 30-minute conversation may only produce one or two 10- to-15 second clips that will be used in the story.

  • Speak to your audience like you would speak to your patients, or your next-door neighbor at the mailbox. Keep it simple and easy to follow.
  • Put the information in context for the audience – What did your study find? Why is this important? How many people are affected? Where do we go from here?
  • Maintain good eye contact with the reporter while answering questions (don’t look directly into the camera unless it is a live interview and you are asked to do so)
  • Don’t give numbered lists such as “three reasons this is important” because the quote typically will not be long enough to include all three.
  • Don’t say “as I said before” because each quote needs to stand on its own.
  • Do not bring a cheat sheet to the interview with answers you have memorized.
  • Don’t guess. If you don’t know the answer, or if the question doesn’t relate to what you do or know about, then go back to your main message or tell them you will get back to them with the answer.
  • There is no such thing as “off the record.” Anything you say can be quoted whether or not the reporter uses the magical phrase “off the record.”

With these tips in mind, the first question is almost always to say and spell your name and give your title. The last question is usually an opportunity to say something you wanted to say that wasn’t asked or an opportunity to reiterate your main point.

The reporters are working hard to generate content every day, so the easier you can make it for them and their audience to understand, the better it will be for all involved.

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Responding to Manuscript Reviews While Avoiding Cerebral Aneurysms

Doing Research / Grants & Funding

On first receiving a set of manuscript reviews, you might feel that your reviewers must be either hopelessly ignorant of the field, actively malevolent, purposefully obtuse, or all three. The thing you must remember, though, is that a request for revisions is as good as acceptance…but only if you’ll put aside your burning desire to see the wretches who did not appreciate your brilliance crushed for their impertinence.

Give it a few days, and then try the following techniques to respond in a way the reviewers will appreciate, while avoiding a cerebral aneurysm:

  • Form a mental image of the reviewer as a close colleague, who is sitting down over a cup of coffee or a beer with you to discuss your paper. His/her comments are thus all meant in the best possible way. Their goal is to improve your science, not destroy it. Respond in kind – the tone of your responses should be friendly and collegial. Remember that these are the guys that get to decide if your paper is accepted or not.
  • Every comment by the reviewer should change something in the paper, but to the extent possible the changes should just be text. When a reviewer asks a question to which a definitive answer would require six months of experiments, the right way to respond is to just acknowledge their question in the discussion. Say, “That is a great question! We’ve added a discussion of that issue as follows:”. When a reviewer makes a comment that’s flat wrong, respond with “That’s a tricky issue, so we’ve clarified it as follows:” or, “We’ve tried to improve our description of that…”.
  • Try to use data you already have in the lab to answer calls for new experiments. You probably continued to do experiments after you sent in the paper, or you have data on the same topic that you didn’t feel was quite right for the manuscript.  At worst, do experiments on things you can pull out of the freezer. We always keep all of our mouse parts, blocks, cDNA, etc. until the paper is published. Do not do extensive new experiments – for instance, new animal experiments – unless the journal is very high impact. You have to decide for yourself where that line is. The trick here is to interpret the reviewers’ comments so that your new data answers the question. Sometimes this requires a very creative interpretation, but I have almost never had a reviewer object – they are just happy that I validated their concern by doing a new experiment.

Reviewers are human, and will usually be happy if you just validate their concerns. To paraphrase St. Augustine, they probably have not “made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine your manuscript in the bonds of Hell.”  Your reviewers genuinely want to improve the quality of the scientific discourse. Following the above rules allows you to respond to a request for major revisions without raising your blood pressure or expending a great deal of effort.

 

More Resources

Reviewers & Editors Share the Secret Sauce

One-Minute Writing Repairs

Vexing Issues for New PIs: Picking Corresponding Author, Potential Reviewers, Blacklisting and Other Angst

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Introverts Can Network, Too!

Communication / Doing Research / Faculty Life / Networking & Collaboration

Do you consider yourself an introvert?  Do you get anxious thinking about how to meet new colleagues? Are you looking for better ways to network without becoming overwhelmed?  

I personally consider myself an introvert, and I have to remind myself that networking is essential to one’s professional career.  Networking is how ideas are spread, collaborative teams are formed, and lifelong relationships are started.  I’m reminded of a quote by Shirley MacLaine (American actress): “The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.”

Given the importance of networking and lack of practical tips, one of my extraverted colleagues and I developed a presentation on this topic.  We consistently find the audience interested in our tips for introverts (and the extraverts who interact with them!), so I’d like to share some of them with you…

Whenever meeting a new person, always make sure you say: (a) your name, (b) where you’re from, and (c) what you do [in less than 15 seconds].  Let the other person do the same, and if the first 30 seconds are going well, I suggest the following ideas & considerations for introverts:

  • Start with small talk because you have at least 1 common topic with anyone around you (i.e., your colocation indicates you have at least 1 mutual interest).  At a national meeting, consider asking something like, “What’s been your favorite part so far?”  If you’re at a breakout session or even a local seminar, try “Can I ask what interested you in this talk?”
  • Convince yourself it’s OK to exit a conversation.  This can be especially challenging when an introvert meets a very talkative extravert because most introverts believe they are being rude by interrupting someone else.  Here’s a secret: extremely extraverted persons are not offended when you move on!  Practice phrases like, “It was great chatting with you, and I hope we keep in touch.  I’d like to keep meeting a few people to maximize my time at the meeting.”  That extraverted person can easily find someone else with whom to network, and the introverted person gets the break she/he needs.
  • Create a balance between: (a) time with others and (b) time with self.  For example, when you attend a national meeting, go to the social events, but save up a few bucks and plan to spend one night in your hotel room and order room service.  And if you need a very quick break in the middle of an event, you could always try faking a phone call and stepping away!
  • If you’re with a trusted colleague, consider the “buddy system.”  Not only can you divide-and-conquer to increase potential contacts, but you can pre-arrange a rescue signal in case you need a little help.

For a greater understanding of introverts, check out Susan Cain’s TEDTalk “The power of introverts” or her related book Quiet.

What ideas have others found successful?  

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Taking Flight

Doing Research

If you want to be off your K or similar career development award before the end of five years, the calendar will tell you that you can’t start later than the third year to submit a substantial grant. For convenience let’s call that major grant an R01 though it could be a VA Merit, NSF award, or other large grant.

Due dates and review timelines can tell you all you need to know. This is not top secret mentoring mojo. Let’s imagine your career development award runs from September 2022 through end of August 2027. Assuming you do not walk on water but your science is compelling, you will need two submissions: a first and a revised submission. You need to arrive at your destination before August of 2027 to avoid speculation about whether you will succeed in transitioning to independence before the end of your career development award. You must avoid a need for bridge funding to be considered completely successful in taking flight on time.

As a rule of thumb a grant of at least $250K direct costs per year for at least three years is a solid win and an R01 or similar with greater award amount or duration is a gold standard win. That means conventional federal review timelines prevail (NIH application and review dates). Let’s back it out:

If you submit your first application in June of 2026 (about 3.5 years into your CDA) it will be reviewed in October or November of 2026* and you will get summary statements just in time to disturb your holidays but likely not in time for November 5, 2026 resubmission. Unless your score is near perfect you will aim to resubmit by the next resubmission window which is March 2027. That means review of your resubmission will be in summer of 2027 with earliest funding start dates of September to December 2027. That’s a painful nail-biting experience (remember your CDA ends in August 2027), especially if you have a tenure and promotion review in the same window.

So, we’re agreed…for sanity and safety, you need to submit earlier. If possible with enough time to get in a full round of submission and start another if (bummer) you crash completely on the first try.


Conclusion:  Grant year two or beginning of year three is the optimal zone. Hope you considered this going into your CDA. A K-award or similar does not give you five years to gather preliminary data and write papers. It gives you 2.5 to 3 years of running room but with potential joy of up to 2 years of overlap for salary support on the K while you start your R01. It is only too early to start if you aren’t competitive for larger grants yet. (We have seen researchers with tight science succeed with first applications in the first year of a CDA.)

Implication: Don’t start a CDA (or concurrent tenure track timeline) until you know you have solid science underway. You can’t beat the clock. It takes time to compete for major grants because of the review and funding cycle and low paylines. Don’t be naive about this – pass it on.

Your major grant needs to be ready for take off at the halfway mark of five year awards.

*Dates approximate from current NIH review schedules; individual study sections and review of RFAs will vary but are rarely faster.

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How to Be Heard by Legislators about Proposed NIH Budget Cuts

Communication / Doing Research

Your senators and congressional representatives want to hear their constituents. They have fairly specific channels they use to estimate the weight of opinion from residents of their districts:  1) phone calls, 2) visits to district/national office(s), 3) letters, and 4) local meetings. The last is getting harder to read. Bet on the former.

Here’s the plan:

  • Identify your legislators and their contact information at whoismyrepresentative.com
  • Call when you have time to be on hold.
  • While you are waiting, Google the address of the district office for each of your legislators. The website above has DC addresses which are slightly less potent.
  • Have your talking points ready (see below). However recognize that you may not get to them in if staff are counting calls by content, a process similar to a yeah or nay poll.

Draft your letters with a similar script:

Who you are:

I am in my third year on faculty at [Important University in Your State]. (Of course I don’t officially represent the university and am sharing my personal views.)

What you study, in plain language:

I study what makes some people much less likely than others to get Alzheimer’s disease using genetics and brain imaging like MRI. We aim to find an approach to prevention.

Current relationship to NIH:

I have an NIH early career award. The federal government has already invested more than $350,000 in helping launch my career and my research team has made breakthroughs.

Remind the staffer that funding is based on merit:

Fewer than one in three scientists who apply receive these awards. I say that to emphasize that researchers do compete to get their research funded.

State what reduction in funding could mean for you and/or your institution:

In the next step of my career, I am currently facing 1 in 5 odds that my NIH proposals will be funded. Less available funding could make this challenge unwinnable for me and for my colleagues.

Closer (your take home message with passion):

The loss of investment in great science and promising investigators will be stunning if the NIH budget is cut.

Offer to stay in touch (scientists on the record are hard to find):

Please feel free to contact me if you need specific stories to make this point.

Email volume is overwhelming and most legislative offices do not have enough staff to sort out signal from noise. Ditto Facebook, Twitter, etc. Even if the legislator has a social media presence, the staff work primarily to control flaming and don’t use comments or messages as data about their base.

In contrast, calls and letters are logged and that makes them potent. Block off time on your calendar for calls as it gets closer to the active consideration of the NIH budget and make those calls. Scientists are making a difference.

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“Modifying the Current Flow from Negative to Positive (Data!)”

Doing Research / Writing & Publishing

Scientists are experts at asking questions, analyzing, and critiquing. We are also taught that while there are rules and facts in biology, exceptions to rules exist – in fact, we expect them. I’m going to talk about critiquing to the point of publishing, about negative (but important!) data, and how science as a whole would benefit from learning from others’ troubleshooting.

One of the greatest accomplishments of modern science is that one does not have to “reinvent the wheel.” If you are trying to detect some biological phenomena, chances are there is a kit made by a company that claims to do exactly what you are trying to do for x amount of dollars. While many kits are truly spectacular and save us time, energy, and tears trying to reinvent the wheel, there are some that are not so spectacular. Or they are, but they don’t do precisely what you’d expect them to because BIOLOGY – there is always an exception to the rule.

Our lab got excited about a kit that uses fluorescent dyes to simultaneously detect hypoxia and reactive oxygen species in live cells. WICKED! I already love imaging and making neurons fluoresce pretty colors, so this would be an added bonus for my project to show that a particular protein is sensitive to hypoxic stress versus oxidative stress. Using the kit was simple. Add red hypoxia dye, add green ROS dye, and image immediately after stressing out my neuronal cultures.

The kit worked! Except…

So these are unstressed neurons. See their happy dendrites extending everywhere? They’ve got great cell bodies too. Happy neurons are happy… except they’re all RED. The fluorescent dye is labeling my non-hypoxic cells as hypoxic, in addition to actual hypoxic cells (who are not as happy).

Why are non-hypoxic cells labeled as hypoxic? Without digressing far into chemistry, the red fluorophore is activated by a diverse class of enzymes that are abundant in every cell – nitroreductases. Some of these enzymes are dependent on oxygen levels to function, while some are oxygen-independent. The red dye is supposed to only fluoresce when in contact with oxygen-dependent nitroreductases – in which we infer detection of hypoxia. However, it is not always wise to make conclusions based on inferences. In this case, what the dye is actually and only measuring is nitroreductase enzyme activity, which are known to be affected by both endogenous and exogenous factors (i.e. not just oxygen!).

After struggling with different parameters to make this kit work for us, we decided to publish negative data (*GASP!*) comparing this kit’s detection of hypoxia to the current standards of measuring hypoxia. Gathering this data only took about six months of work, but about two years to publish because many journals – even methods journals – remain hesitant to publish negative data or data based on non-novel concepts. Eventually, we were able to publish this work, but it took much longer than expected. In that timeframe many other labs could have purchased the same kit and obtained false-positive results.

Publishing negative data and data that fail to replicate previous findings are as important as novel data in that they save you time and keep you from going down rabbit-holes. It’s so important that PLOS ONE recently launched “The Missing Pieces” collection that publishes such valuable negative findings. BioMed Central also provides such a platform in Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, stating that “publishing well documented failures may reveal fundamental flaws and obstacles in commonly used methods, drugs or reagents such as antibodies or cell lines, ultimately leading to improvements in experimental designs and clinical decisions.”

Another bonus of publishing this paper is that we got to publish a pun. As you can tell from this blog title, I LOVE puns.

Hehe, get it? The current dogma, as in electrical currents? Going from negative to pos- okay I’ll stop.

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Don’t Miss the Deal Breakers: Nine Questions for New Lab Staff Hires

Doing Research

Hooray! You’ve set up a lab. You have a scale and everything. Now the applicants are pounding down your door looking forward to helping you get the Nobel Prize. Before you hire the most enthusiastic person with the best grades, be sure you include some questions that could be deal breakers even for the candidates you think are fabulous.

1.     Tell me about your undergrad research project. This is a great open-ended question that helps you quickly determine their level of comfort with what they were doing and how deep they dug into understanding their prior work.

2.     What are your goals for the next five years? That great candidate you found may look great to medical or graduate schools as well. And there’s a solid population of folks who are eager to parlay a few years of lab experience into a foothold for post-graduate education. Many labs make this work extremely well, but others need a longer-term hire. Make sure you have someone who can stay on the same timeline as you.

3.     Tell me about your level of comfort with (human specimens, animals, working with radiation and/or toxins, collecting phone survey data etc.) anything that you may take for granted but is critical for the job. There are great resources for teaching folks the ins and outs of personal protection, data organization and other skills, but you’ll have a whole other problem if they are horrified at the very thought of working with people/mice/specimens.

4.     Which of these skills on your resume are you ready to do immediately with little supervision? If its hard to believe your luck in finding someone capable of performing GC/MS, laser scanning microscopy and electrophysiology in ontogenetically labeled cells, that may be because they have a different idea of “skills” listed on their resume than you do. Make sure they can do the techniques listed rather than just having seen them done. A few methodological questions go a long way to identifying pros from enthusiasts.

5.     Can you travel? While it may be obvious that attending national meetings and presenting your lab’s results is a key feature of the job, don’t forget to ask.

6.     Who can I ask about what it’s like to have you as a supervisor? Being savvy, you surely got letters of recommendation from your candidates bosses, but what is it like to work for this person? The kind of boss they are to undergrads and rotation students in your lab will greatly impact your ability recruit the best labbies and keep them happy.

7.     Why should we hire you? Do they think they are technically amazing, a phenomenal organizer or just can get things done well? Give them a chance to tell you any information that they believe that you need to know.

8.     What do you think would be your greatest attribute in working in a (high paced/detail oriented/large/small….pick your descriptor) lab?

Protip: Send them a copy of your latest article and your lab rules before they get there and ask them if they have any questions about your work or work environment.

 

Now give yourself a pat on the back and publish some cool stuff with your swell new hire.

Did we miss anything? Leave us a comment!!

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Doing Research

Play and Learn! CCTS Launches Kaizen-based Game to Teach Scientific Reproducibility

To help young investigators meet an impending NIH policy requiring formal training in scientific rigor and reproducibility, CCTS has launched a new web-based quiz game. Based on the Kaizen (Japanese for “continuous improvement”) platform developed by CCTS Informatics, this strategy has been successfully used to provide continuing education to medical, nursing, and dental students. The game offers a fun alternative for those who must master new competencies.

CCTS created the R2T (rigor, reproducibility, and transparency) game with institutional T and K trainees as well as individual K and F awardees in mind, but “everyone is eligible and encouraged to participate,” said CCTS Research Commons Executive Administrator Dr. Jennifer Croker.

Interested? Email Brian Wallace (jetytrip@uab.edu) with your first and last name, institution, and email address.

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The Recruitment Tool You Didn’t Know You Have

Doing Research

If you are based at one of these 165 US institutions and you’re looking to recruit volunteers for your research study, you need to check out ResearchMatch.org!  ResearchMatch offers a completely free way to find potential research participants from a growing pool that now includes over 140,000 individuals willing to be in research studies.

ResearchMatch has a simple goal – to bring together: (1) people who are willing to participate in research and (2) researchers who are looking for participants. It is a free and secure registry developed by major academic institutions across the country to help facilitate the completion of clinical trials and make a real difference for everyone’s health in the future.

The process is simple: Check if your institution is a participant, register with ResearchMatch, have proof of your IRB approval (both for your study and to use ResearchMatch as a recruitment tool), and describe whom you want to invite to participate in your research. Your request will be reviewed by your institutional liaison. If approved, you will enter your study’s criteria in the ResearchMatch Search Builder, which will yield a de-identified list of volunteers who match your criteria. Then you send out IRB-approved contact message to these potential matches through ResearchMatch. The secure ResearchMatch clearinghouse will route your message to each of these potential matches and they will have the option of replying “yes,” “no,” or no response. You may contact those who agree to be contacted.

Voila! Participants for protocols that range from intervention trials to survey research.

Map of Sites

ResearhMatch Main Page

Researcher FAQ

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