CoR News (March 2, 2016)

CoR NEWSMarch 2, 2016

To: APLU Council on ResearchFrom: APLU CoR Staff

Attachments: 2016 CoR Summer Meeting Save the Date; 2016 Lab Safety Workshop Flyer

• 2016 CoR Summer Meeting Save the Date (July 31 – August 3)
• Precision Medicine Initiative Updates
• Open Data Update
• Laboratory Safety Workshop (April 10-12, 2016 at NIH)
• Crowdsourcing Research Funding Opportunity: IARPA CREATE (Due April 18, 2016)

• 2016 CoR Summer Meeting Save the Date (July 31 – August 3)

The APLU Council on Research is pleased to announce the dates (July 31 – August 3) and location (Morgantown, West Virginia) of the 2016 CoR Summer Meeting (see attached flyer). CoR session topics will include Open and Public Access, Large Federally-Funded Research Centers, and SBIR/STTR. The developing program will also include a New and Future VPR workshop (July 31), joint programming with the APLU Council on Governmental Affairs (August 2), and a site visit to a local attraction (TBD). Meeting registration is expected to open by mid-March. Please contact Beverly Steele (bsteele@aplu.org or 202-478-6033) with any questions.

• Precision Medicine Initiative Updates

The White House released a fact sheet last week on “Key Actions to Accelerate Precision Medicine Initiative” (PMI). These announcements include:

• Release of the PMI Draft Data Security Policy Principles and Framework with a public comment period ending on March 25, 2016; comments can be submitted here.
• Announcement that Vanderbilt University, in collaboration with the private company, Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), the University of Michigan, and the Broad Institute, have been awarded funds to pilot participant recruitment for the PMI’s anticipated 1M-person cohort. This award is the “Direct Volunteers Pilot Studies.”
• Establishment of the PMI Cohort Program Institutional Review Board (IRB)

• Open Data Update

A February 22nd White House blog post reflects on Federal Open Data policies three years after the release of the original White House Open data memorandum. The 2013 memo called for the development of plans to increase public access to research results for Federal agencies with more than $100M in annual R&D expenditures. To date, 17 Federal departments and agencies have issued public access plans. The blog post reviews the status of these plans and their requirements.

• Laboratory Safety Workshop (April 10-12, 2016 at NIH)

CoR’s Task Force on Laboratory Safety will soon release A Guide to Implementing a Safety Culture in Our Universities, which includes recommendations and tools for campuses committed to improving laboratory safety. In anticipation of that report, we share an upcoming safety opportunity. APLU Task Force members Gene Block, Taylor Eighmy, Kimberly Jeskie, Dawn Mason, Nancy Wayne, William Tolman, and Alice Young will speak at this upcoming workshop:

The University of California Center for Laboratory Safety is co-sponsoring an innovative lab safety workshop with the National Institutes of Health-Division of Occupational Health and Safety, the Safety by Design Workshop 2016 (see attached program). The workshop will be held April 10-12, 2016 on the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring researchers and health & safety experts together to solve problems in the area of laboratory safety. Too often, researchers and EH&S staff develop antagonistic relationships even though we have the common goal of conducting safe science. This is a chance to get the two sides together and work towards developing a more unified understanding of what it takes to put safety first while performing cutting edge, outstanding research.

The workshop organizers ask that you forward this to your laboratory researchers and offer travel support for up to two faculty, students, or postdoctoral fellows to attend per campus. Registration has already opened and although it is almost filled. Organizers are looking for more researchers to participate. They would also welcome your participation in the workshop.

Questions and names of interested researchers can be sent to Dr. Imke Schroeder at ischroeder@ehs.ucla.edu.

• Crowdsourcing Research Funding Opportunity: IARPA CREATE (Due April 18, 2016)

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has just announced a new funding opportunity for research on crowdsourced reasoning. CREATE (Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation) is soliciting proposals from interdisciplinary research teams.

This program aims to extend crowdsourcing beyond its traditional applications. Whereas Wikipedia and prediction markets use the power of crowds to consolidate information and produce forecasts, CREATE will link crowdsourcing to structured techniques in order to improve reasoning about complex analytic issues. The resulting methods are expected to have value not just for intelligence analysis but also for science, law, and policy – and any domain where people must think their way through complex questions.

CREATE is a multi-year research program, and IARPA anticipates multiple awards. Proposals are due April 18, 2016. The announcement is at FedBizOpps (Solicitation Number IARPA-BAA-15-11), and additional information is available on the IARPA website.