UofSC Future Planning Group update

New information is now available on the Future Planning Group (FPG) formed by President Caslen earlier this month to guide the university’s plan for returning to campus safely in the coming months. The FPG website now lists all members of the seven committees that comprise it, along with descriptions of each committee’s unique purpose, a timeline for decision-making and other information on how planning will be undertaken. President Caslen will hold virtual town halls on the evenings of Monday and Tuesday, April 27 and 28, to share information with and take questions from the UofSC community. The virtual town hall for students and families will be held on Monday, April 27, at 6:00 p.m., and the town hall for faculty and staff will be held Tuesday, April 28, at 6:00 p.m. Refer to the official UofSC COVID-19 website for complete details, to be posted on Sunday, April 26.

 

IBC to hold extra meeting to review COVID-19 research protocols

The UofSC Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) will be holding an extra meeting to support COVID-19 research projects that involve biological materials requiring IBC review and approval. The protocol submission deadline for this meeting is Monday, April 27, at 5:00 p.m. If you plan to conduct COVID-19 research that requires IBC approval, please submit your protocol before this deadline. Any protocols that are not submitted by the deadline will be reviewed during the regularly scheduled quarterly IBC meetings. (The next regular quarterly meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, May 27, with a submission deadline of Wednesday, May 6.) Researchers can find additional information, including the IBC’s new Biosafety Guidance for COVID-19 Research (pdf), on the IBC website.

 

Critical on-campus research activities

The Office of the Vice President for Research has received 180 applications from faculty identifying 566 individuals as critical for on-campus research activities who are approved to come into work on campus. If you need to designate yourself and/or researchers on your team as critical to on-campus research, please complete the Critical On-Campus Research Activities Form During COVID-19 Emergency in USCeRA, on the Proposals tab. (Please contact Elizabeth Renedo at RenedoE@mailbox.sc.edu if you have questions about the form.)

 

Join tomorrow’s NIH webinar on sharing, discovering and citing COVID-19 data

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is hosting a free webinar for researchers to learn how to share, discover and cite COVID-19 data and code in generalist repositories tomorrow, Friday, April 24, at 2:00 p.m. Through this webinar, researchers will have an opportunity to hear from multiple generalist repositories about the ways each repository is supporting discoverability and reusability of COVID-19 data and associated code. The NLM will also provide an overview of available COVID-19 literature. Complete information is available on the NIH website.

 

Additional COVID-19 resources for all researchers from the NIH

The NIH offers a large and growing set of resources to support researchers from all disciplines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• The NIH Office of Intramural Training & Education is offering new webinars, videos and other materials to support PIs and their trainees. Most resources available on their website and YouTube channel (select the Videos tab to see the latest offerings first) are applicable to researchers across all disciplines, not only those in the health sciences.
• In the past few months, the scientific community has ramped up research in response to the COVID-19 pandemic with dozens of peer-reviewed articles and preprints added to the literature every day. This rapidly expanding effort has created challenges for scientists and the medical community who need to analyze thousands of scholarly articles for insights on the virus. To help in this effort, the NLM recently launched a COVID-19 Portfolio Tool to help researchers analyze COVID-19 literature.

 

23 April 2020