2019 Annual Meeting for Administrators of Awards from the Fogarty International Center

The meeting in 2019 was hosted by the Center for Integrated Global Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. Professor Gene Morse, the Principal Investigator on the HIV Research Training Program and the Global Infectious Diseases Research Training Program hosted the meeting, which was facilitated by Ms Kelly Tooley, on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

Fogarty grant administrators from many US universities such as Vanderbilt, Rutgers, Maryland, Washington and Indiana as well as from Makerere University in Uganda, the Nigerian Institute for Medical Research, the University of the West Indies, the University of Zimbabwe amongst others attended the meeting. The University of Cape Town was represented by Kathryn Wood from CIDRI-Africa. There was one other delegate from South Africa, Carla Pettit from the SARETI project at UKZN.

In addition to information about the State University of New York’s collaborative research programs, Dr Morse from University of Buffalo and Dr Charles Maponga from the University of Zimbabwe described their collaborative D43 program based at the University of Buffalo.

Dr Geetha Bansal, the Program Officer for the Fogarty HIV Research Training Program, outlined helpful updates from the FIC, Celia Wolfman outlined the importance of Careertrac and Bruce Butrum, the Chief Grants Management Officer at FIC, also gave updates on Grants Management and allowable costs. All of these were presented as webinars.

Sharon Nolan-Weiss, Director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion led an interesting discussion on “topics tough to talk about”, followed by a presentation on preparing scholars for life in the US from International Student Services.

On Day 2, Roopa Sriram from the University of Washington presented their Mentoring Program followed by a panel discussion on mentoring. A workshop discussion was held on best practises on documenting Responsible Conduct of Research activities which highlighted the need for ongoing monitoring of these activities.

Mary Kraft, Director—post awards, and Jeff Schieder, Director—pre awards, from the University of Buffalo, shared their experiences, with advice on keeping up with evolving NIH policies.

The final afternoon session dealt with the legal considerations on agreements, IRB matters and research compliance.

This was a very useful networking meeting, setting up international contacts and receiving updates to the NIH FIC guidelines.

 

-Kathryn Wood September 2019