Virtual Research Administration Conference - Friday Sessions

Being able to deliver and receive constructive feedback is a crucial party of any employee's job, no matter where they are in the company's hierarchy. As part of your professional development, consider how you can give clear and concise feedback respectfully and how you can graciously listen to other as they provide feedback to you. 

Content level: Basic

Learning objectives:

1. Learn about feedback and how it can benefit employees
2. Learn when to give feedback, how to give it, and examples of constructive feedback

Track: Professional Development

Speaker(s): Gina Hedberg, Associate Vice President for Research / Executive Director, Office of Sponsored Programs, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Public trust in the scientific process and scholarly output is faltering. Research administrators and compliance professionals are uniquely positioned to help the public understand the connection between extensive regulatory requirements and research integrity. This session will facilitate brainstorming to identify specific ways that research administrators can educate the general public about the importance of research and contribute to the re-creation of public trust.   

Content level: Advanced

Learning objectives:

1. Cite U.S. trends in public support of research.
2. Identify actions research administrators can take to improve public trust of research among key stakeholders.

Track: Administration and Management

Clinical Trials Research Administration Required: Research Integrity (CTRA-R)

Speaker(s): Michelle Stevenson, Associate Vice President - Research Integrity, The University of Texas at San Antonio

This session will provide tips and techniques as well as an overview of various types of electronic search directories, engines, services and databases. Key considerations such as application due date, funding limitation, eligibility and other restrictions will be covered. Additionally search strategies using a wide range of funding programs, sources and opportunities applicable to specialty are provided. Participants will also review email alert services and the use of social media, particularly twitter streams as an optimal tool in funding development and dissemination of funding trends and opportunities in a global context.

Content level: Basic

Learning objectives:

1. Knowledge of the many levels of investigator and institutional compliance.

2. A framework for guiding investigators to successful proposal activities

Track: Pre-Award

Pre-Award Required: Finding Funding Opportunities (PA-II)

Speaker(s): Karen Mitchell, Assistant Vice President, Research Administration, Temple University; Debra Sokalczuk, Award Management Coordinator, Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg

 Federal enforcement agencies spent year 2023 identifying new areas of focus in curtailing fraud, with investigations, settlements, disclosures, and whistleblower cases in the False Claims Act universe centered on topics such as cybersecurity-related fraud and applying the “knowledge” standard set forth by the Supreme Court in analyzing potentially fraudulent claims and misconduct.  By reviewing highlights and trends in 2023, Feldesman Leifer LLP partners Mindy B. Pava and Rosie Dawn Griffin will provide an overview of how government agencies intend to shape their enforcement approaches in 2024.

Ms. Pava and Ms. Griffin will discuss considerations relevant to how research institutions can mitigate enforcement risk in the coming year.

Content Level: Intermediate
Learning Objectives:

1. Translate federal enforcement agencies’ recent enforcement priorities and investigations to your own use of federal funds, to better identify potential compliance risk areas;
2. Identify new task forces and other active government initiatives aimed at combating misuse of federal dollars

Track: Contract Law

Speaker(s): Mindy Pava, Counsel, Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fifell, LLP; Rosie Griffin, Counsel, Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fifell, LLP

The past few years has seen some high profile researchers both in the US and abroad who have fallen under scrutiny of scientific misconduct over plagiarism, falsification or fabrication.  Case studies will be used to illustrate each of these examples of research misconduct and the outcomes of investigations in to these allegations.  The session will also touch on the emerging areas of research misconduct arising from the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and conflicts of interest and commitment.  

Content level: Intermediate
Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the different types of misconduct
2. Gain insights into potential consequences and outcomes of misconduct investigations

Track: Compliance and Ethics

Clinical Trials Research Administration Required: Research Integrity (CTRA-R)

Speaker(s): Susie Sedwick, Senior Consulting Specialist, Attain Partners 

Content level: Intermediate

Learning objectives:

Track: Finance

Speaker(s): Gil Tran, Senior Specialist Leader, Attain Partner

During this session, attendees will be guided through a manager's insightful journey in establishing streamlined processes for monitoring team members' workloads. The discussion will encompass strategies for workload distribution, the creation of intuitive workload dashboards, and the profound significance of implementing metrics to gauge and optimize workloads.

Content level: Intermediate

Learning objectives:

1. Participants will gain insights into crafting valuable metrics for teams and learn practical applications for their implementation.
2. Participants will comprehend the significance of metrics tracking and acquire knowledge on creating metric dashboards as a practical approach for managing and tracking workloads.

Track: Administration and Management

Speaker(s):  Elise Dantuma, Assistant Director of Research Programs, Mayo Clinic

Developing sound processing for working with faculty to submit proposals. Working through the process step by step to from reading the RFP, developing the budget to final submission.

Content level: Basic

Learning objectives:

1. Learn best practices for proposal submission
2. How to work with faculty not against.

Track: Pre-Award

Speaker(s): Kimberly McKoy, Accountant former Assistant Director for Pre-Award, North Carolina State University

Managing large proposals can be a tricky task for even the seasoned research administration.  There are often larger proposal teams, bigger budgets, and more partners.  And all of this is added to all of the other components that research administrations have to serve as the expert on, like, managing timelines, formatting, sponsor requirements, and so much more.  This presentation will show provide some tips and tricks on how to successfully handle large proposals.

Content level: Intermediate

Learning Objects: 

1. At the end of the presentation, attendees will be able to articulate at least 2 strategies that they can implement when managing a large/complex proposal.
2. At the end of the presentation, attendees will be able to describe how to execute their role as a research administrator while working on a large/complex proposal.

Track: Pre-Award

Pre-Award Certificate: Elective

Speaker(s): Melinda Marino, Research Advancement Manager, Arizona State University

With increasingly rigorous regulations imposed on research institutions and investigators, ensuring integrity and compliance of research conduct has become even more challenging for key players. Scientific findings about cognitively-based compassion training may shed light on new ways research administration may achieve compliance. The speaker will share case studies and anecdotes of practice through compassion training and the application of compassion in professional settings. This presentation will focus on an innovative shift to address research compliance challenges through cognitively-based compassion trained skills.  Application of these skills have shown promise in overcoming obstacles of communication and management issues, ensuring delivery of quality assurance service, empowering investigators, furthering the desired research outcome, and collectively cultivating a culture of compliance.

Content level: Intermediate 

Learning objectives:

1. Identify characteristics of human reactions to “compliance” and the challenges to monitor and maintain compliance.
2. Recognize characteristics and list methods demonstrating that compassion could be practiced and applied to cultivate a culture of compliance in research settings.

Track: Compliance and Ethics

Speaker(s): Niem-Tzu (Rebecca) Chen, Human Subjects Protection Senior Analyst, Rutgers University

Are you leaving money on the proverbial table? Do your clinical trials have positive net income? Are you billing for everything you can in the contract? Are you getting paid in a timely manner? Do you even know the answers to these questions? Come learn from my mistakes. We did leave money on the table. Our clinical trials lost money. (As a side note, this could be considered financially supporting a for-profit company’s activities and jeopardize your non-profit status). We didn’t bill for everything and were not getting paid in a timely manner, if at all. Now, we have systems in place to turn it all around and in the spirit of academia, we want to share our results to help you do the same thing. This isn’t rocket science, but it is medical research and we owe to our current and future patients to get it right in order to continue in this business of improving human health.

Content level: Intermediate 

Track: Clinical and Translational

Speaker(s): Kevin Titus, Sr. Business Director, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center; Melissa Mingler, Business Manager, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

This program will describe how to get from reactive to proactive in a diverse and complex post award management portfolio.  We will discuss how to incorporate internal controls in our day-to-day research administration responsibilities.

Content level: Basic

Learning objectives: 

1. The learner will gain knowledge in what internal controls are and the importance of incorporating internal controls into post award management.
2. We will discuss the implementation of internal controls during the life of the award, from award setup through closeout.

Track: Finance

Speaker(s): Betty Morgan, Sponsored Projects Analyst, Pre-Award, The George Washington University; Carly Pigg, Research Financial Analyst, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center

Pre-Award and Post-Award responsibilities can be defined differently among institutions, whether in the department or a central office.  In this roundtable discussion, led by Laurian Bradford and Megan Elmendorf, identifying where Pre stops, and Post begins will be discussed.  Breakout sessions will include identifying job responsibilities that fall under your re or post award role in your institution.  The group will come together to discuss the pros and cons of different responsibilities falling under pre or post award, and exchange information to continue the conversation after the session.    

Content level: Intermediate 

Learning objectives:

1. Understand different structures and their benefits.
2. Increase awareness of different structures and how this can impact who they interact with day to day

Track: Administration and Management

Speaker(s): Laurian Bradford, Director, Sponsored Programs, The Research Foundation for SUNY, Downstate Health Sciences University; Megan Elmendorf, The Research Foundation for SUNY, Downstate Health Sciences University

When submitting a proposal to a sponsor, one must present and justify all the expenses required to achieve the project’s aims and objectives, with consideration to what is realistic, necessary, and reasonable. This presentation will explain the basic elements of budget development and why they are an integral part of project planning at the proposal and progress report stages.

Content level: Basic

Learning objectives:

1. To learn the basic building blocks of budgets
2. To learn strategies used by the University of Pittsburgh Office of Grants and Contracts to streamline the budget building process for more accurate and consistent processes during the proposal submission and progress report stages

Track: Pre-Award 

Pre-Award Certificate: Elective

Speaker(s): Samantha Stilson, Post-Award Grants Specialist III, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; Elizabeth Yute, Pre-Award Grants Specialist III, University of Pittsburgh 

While there are challenges to oversight of intranational research collaborations, they pale in comparison to those faced when participating in transnational research collaborations - including but not limited to those arising from different cultural, regulatory, and institutional contexts. But, then, so do the opportunities. This session is designed to explore the various challenges that institutions face when conducting collaborative transnational research. Panelist will address a variety of issues that may arise regarding transnational research how they have addressed them.
Content Level: Basic
Learning objectives:

1. Identify and discuss challenges in the oversight of transnational research collaborations
2. Identify best practices - policy and process - for research administration and compliance in the review of transnational human subjects research

Track: Contract Law

Speaker(s): John Baumann, Associate Vice President for Research Compliance, Indiana University

This session will provide the audience with an introduction to research compliance and the application of compliance concepts to research administrators. This session will focus on what research administrators need to know about human subjects research, research involving animals, conflicts of interest, research misconduct and other focus areas that make up a research compliance program.

Content level: Basic/Intermediate

Learning objectives:  

Track: Contract Law

Speaker(s): Cheryl Byers, Vice President & Principal, Institutional Research Center of Excellence, Advarra

Although much progress has been made to arrive at conducting clinical trials in a fair, responsible and ethical manner when compared to those that were conducted some decades ago, there still exist some challenges and lacunae that need to be addressed. This presentation touches upon the history of ethics in clinical trials, the progress made till date and the current challenges at the global level in conducting clinical trials in an ethical manner.

Content level: Basic
Learning objectives:

1. Understand ethics in clinical trials, history and progress made till date
2. Understand the current challenges regarding ethics in global clinical trial scenario

Track: Clinical and Translational

Clinical Trials Research Administration Certificate: Elective

Speaker(s): Mani Cheruvu, Clinical Research Manager, St Francis Health System

With the increasing regulations being imposed on subawards to the prime entities, it is now more important than ever to have a robust sub award management system and team in place to ensure compliance and accountability. This session will cover the importance of the roles of the PI (yes, they have a role in this!), the central office, the department as well as the subrecipient to ensure a seamless partnership. The session will discuss the roles in relation to various aspects including, but not limited to, pre-award tasks, negotiations, FFATA reporting, Invoicing, performance monitoring and the new NIH regulations for international subrecipient (Section 15.2 of the NIH Grants Policy Statement).

Content level: Intermediate 

Track: Administration and Management

Speaker(s): Amanda Seymour, Manager, Attain Partners; John Hedberg, Senior Associate, Attain Partners