News for All Faculty and Research Staff      Sept. 22, 2014

Kick-off Meetings Set for the Research Administrators Information Network

The Research Administrators Information Network (RAIN) will meet for the first time this academic year Sept. 29 in Newark and Oct. 6 on Busch Campus. Sponsored by the Division of Grants and Contracts Administration and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, RAIN did not meet during the integration. The guest speaker will be Terri Goss Kinzy, associate vice president for research administration, who will discuss Reflections a Year Post-Merger and Into the Looking Glass Moving Forward. Read more here. 

NIH Training Course: Introduction to the Principles and Practice of Clinical Research

The RBHS Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research is providing faculty and staff access to the NIH Introduction to the Principles and Practice of Clinical Research (IPPCR) training course. The course will be available for online viewing from Oct. 14-March 9. Learn more about the IPPCR program here. Contact the RBHS research office for more information about the IPPCR course.

The highly publicized lapses in biosafety practices involving federal laboratories has led the NIH to send a Notice of National Biosafety Stewardship Month and Health and Safety Requirement for NIH Grantees to the universities, contractors and others receiving NIH funding. Rutgers' Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), composed of Rutgers faculty members performing biological research, is encouraging university faculty and staff to take note of the NIH communications. Also, the Office of Research and Economic Development and the IBC encourage all investigators to complete an online culture collection survey to document the materials stored in their laboratories. Instructions are posted here. Read more here.

All Rutgers faculty, staff and students are invited to participate in the Nicholson Foundation & Rutgers Healthcare Delivery Innovation Idea-thon, a competition to improve health outcomes of vulnerable populations and reduce health care costs. In phase one, three teams will win a total of $15,000 in prizes and additional perks. The second phase is a challenge and the winning team receives $50,000 to participate in the final phase, a pilot test in a clinical or community setting. Read more here.

An NIH expert on strategic alliances will speak at the annual Innovations in Dermatological Sciences conference Oct. 8 in New Brunswick. Sponsored by the Center for Dermal Research, the meeting will focus on how the university, industry and government sectors can collaborate to translate cutting-edge dermatological research into clinical use. This conference brings together experts who have had experience with cross-sector collaboration to share their successes, best-practices and lessons learned. New to the list of speakers is Charles Biebylski Ph.D., J.D., strategic alliances manager for the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The agenda and online registration are on the Center for Dermal Research website. 

Rutgers' Institutional Review Boards and Human Subjects Protection Program are airing a webinar on "Big Data and the IRB," presented by Boston University's School of Medicine Oct. 24, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at Newark (School of Dental Medicine) and New Brunswick (Clinical Academic Building). The goal of the webinar is to explore current solutions and best practices to successfully collect, store and use large data and biospecimen collections with the approval of the IRB. More details here. 

Physics Professor Listed as One of the Most Influential Scientific Minds

Sang-Wook Cheong has been listed by Thomson-Reuters as one of The Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014. This list, which covers 21 fields of science (highlycited.com), represents some of the world's leading scientific minds. These researchers are those who wrote the greatest numbers of reports designated by Essential Science Indicators as Highly Cited Papers, ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and publication year. Cheong noted that his former doctoral student, Yew San Hor, assistant professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, also is on the list. Cheong is director of the Rutgers Center for Emergent Materials.

Ivan Rodero has been selected as a 2014 Young Achievers in Scalable Computing and awarded the IEEE Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers. This award recognizes up to three individuals worldwide who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of scalable computing within five years of receiving their doctorate. Rodero is an assistant research professor at the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute. Read more here.

Federal Agency Honors Rutgers Food Innovation Center

The Rutgers Food Innovation Center, a business incubation and economic development program of the N.J. Agricultural Experiment Station, has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a winner of its first Growth Accelerator Fund competition. The FIC is the only recipient from New Jersey to earn this award and will receive a cash prize of $50,000 to create the infrastructure for developing this new accelerator program. Read more here.

Key Contacts for Research Support

The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs has a new website with a staff list denoting assigned areas. A list of other key contacts has been posted here, including staff with ORED and elsewhere at Rutgers. Send suggestions to [email protected].

You Can Contribute Content and Email Addresses

We invite you to submit news or events that are related to research for this newsletter, which goes to all Rutgers faculty and our list of more than 530 research staff. We continue to expand that list, so please send email addresses of any Rutgers staff members who should get our newsletter to [email protected].