Responsible Conduct of Research

HPM 548 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course meets the NIH and NSF training requirement for all trainees, fellows, participants, and scholars receiving support through any NIH training, career development award, research education grant, or dissertation research grant. It describes basic ethical and regulatory requirements for conducting research. Topics include the following:

1. conflict of interest – personal, professional, and financial – and conflict of commitment, in allocating time, effort, or other research resources
2. policies regarding human subjects, live vertebrate animal subjects in research, and safe laboratory practices
3. mentor/mentee responsibilities and relationships
4. safe research environments (e.g., those that promote inclusion and are free of sexual, racial, ethnic, disability and other forms of discriminatory harassment)
5. collaborative research, including collaborations with industry and investigators and institutions in other countries
6. peer review, including the responsibility for maintaining confidentiality and security in peer review
7. data acquisition and analysis; laboratory tools (e.g., tools for analyzing data and creating or working with digital images); recordkeeping practices, including methods such as electronic laboratory notebooks
8. secure and ethical data use; data confidentiality, management, sharing, and ownership
9. research misconduct and policies for handling misconduct
10. responsible authorship and publication
11. the scientist as a responsible member of society, contemporary ethical issues in biomedical research, and the environmental and societal impacts of scientific research
12. export control

Course Note: HSPH Graduate students, post-doc fellows, and HSPH junior faculty members will be allowed to take the course without paying tuition, but are expected to attend all lectures, participate in class discussions and complete homework assignments.