New Faculty Information Series #4: Compliance and Ethics in Research

Levi O’Loughlin: Okay, I’ll go ahead and start here. I’m Levi O’Loughlin and I work as the Associate Director of the Research Safety Program. I’m also a University Biosafety Officer. So anything, biohazardous I would work with you on that. And then if you have any research integrity issues or, misconduct allegations, I would help you solve those problems.

Levi O’Loughlin: Most of the Office of Research and really, our group in the Assurances sphere, we consider ourselves, semiprofessional problem solvers. So, we try to help researchers solve their problems, to be able to do the work as ethically as, safely as possible. So I just on this title slide I put down here, this is actually, some GFP expressing e coli written out as Go Cougs! on a plate.

Levi O’Loughlin: So it’s one of the cooler ones I have. Looking at my SMB friend and, if you want to make anything cool with something like this, let me know. I like these things. So I’ll start with just our website. Right. So in the bottom right corner here it is ora.wsu.edu, what my office does is we house the four main presidential committees, for most research.

Levi O’Loughlin: And then we’ve got a couple other research. Research associated services that we do. And then I’ll give you websites for other offices that do a little bit more, like EHS. But I’d like to start off these talks, putting this slide up from COGR. So what you can see on this slide is it’s kind of this hockey stick graph, in 1991.

Levi O’Loughlin: And that’s where you count as baseline of changes from the federal level to a researcher And since 1991, we’ve had 270 new regulations. And if you look at that, it really increases quite a bit from 2014 on to 2025 here. That’s the biggest change. So there’s a lot pushed on the faculty. And so that’s why we consider ourselves problem solvers.

Levi O’Loughlin: We want to help you navigate these rules, to the best of our abilities so that you can focus on the research. What’s crazy to me is if you overlay this with funding, and I’ll do that now, this is the ratio of funding that, is given to universities. So even though we have 270 new regulations over the last 30 ish years, it’s not like funding necessarily gone up to help with that so that the universities administrators are being squeezed to do more and more with less.

Levi O’Loughlin: And, it it’s hard bat- battle to, overcome. So, if you ever feel like talking about this more, I’m happy to do that. But I’ll cover the main ones in broad boxes for researchers at WSU. So, like I said, we have the four main presidential committees, right? IACUC, IRB and RAD safety. Below that we have the research services.

Levi O’Loughlin: This is all on that website of ORA. But I’m also going to go through these other, topics here just briefly and give you resources there so that you can either find out more information or like I said, feel free to pause this discussion. Interrupt me, put something in the chat, raise your hand, something like that.

Levi O’Loughlin: And we can kind of get into the more details of what we’re going to cover. The first thing I always try to point out is for people submitting grants, either as a grant administrator or as a PI or researcher. A lot of the information that we’re going to cover, is in appendix two here. When you put in eREX for a grant where you check these boxes, that’ll point you toward the right direction of maybe of a oversight committee, or maybe we need to have, you know, a technology control plan or something along those lines

Levi O’Loughlin: so that we can help assist with the research. So each of these leads you to a different area of either our office or another, office on the WSU campus. So I’ll start off the first one, just talking about animals. I don’t know if anybody uses animals in the research, but just simply who who’s responsible for animal welfare at a institution like WSU.

Levi O’Loughlin: So as you ponder that, I’ll pop out just who I think is here. You can have all of your funders, right? USDA is going to care about any kind of Ag animal. NIH is typically your rodent population in model systems. And then there’s an entire office, a federal office dedicated to laboratory animal welfare. We also have our OCV folks, the veterinarian who has to have access to all 70,000 critters.

Levi O’Loughlin: We have, on average over the year, we have dedicated staff in animal welfare program. We have all kinds of, state or local WSU specific rules. But ultimately, I like to think of the people doing the work are most responsible. So, you’ll get familiar with the “you” slide, or the “you” image of because it really does come down to each individual.

Levi O’Loughlin: So if you are using animals, this will go through one of those presidential committees and then Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. And this is one we actually say is one word IACUC. They look after care of the critter and the person doing it, and they’ll go through and, work through all of the, procedures you want to do.

Levi O’Loughlin: And these are kind of the things that they look up for. So looking for animal welfare, you follow training or recommendations based on this guide and then know that we as an institution have participated in ALAC accreditation. So what ALAC allows us to do is now for any researcher using an animal model, instead of describing how we’re going to take care of that animal and the people that work in that environment, we can just say we’re ALAC accredited.

Levi O’Loughlin: And that means that, our institution is at a certain level that you don’t have to justify that, because we’ve already done a voluntary accreditation. The university spends a couple hundred thousand dollars on this every three years to, maintain the certification so that we can, make it easier for researchers to use animal models. We do have a book that everybody has to follow, and I need to put out this guide.

Levi O’Loughlin: It’s commonly referred to as the guide. And so that’ll kind of detail, you know, lighting, environmental enrichment and all those things for each species we work with. And then I put the three R’s here and this is what IACUC reviews. So if you can replace an animal with, something that’s not an animal, that’s preferable.

Levi O’Loughlin: So if you use a cell culture model or, computer model, that would be great. Reduction is going to be the smallest amount of animals you possibly need, rather than, you know, using 100. Can you get by with ten? And that’s statistically significant. And then we’re finding is to make procedures as least invasive as possible for, research question.

Levi O’Loughlin: we’re asking. So what does that actually look like if you work with an animal. Well we got a form for that. So it’s an ASAF an animal subject approval form. You detail out everything you’re going to do there for any critter that’s here for more than 12 hours. So it’s going to be all the procedures you’re going to work with, whether there is a biosecurity, or biosafety issues or, maybe there’s radiation involved with it.

Levi O’Loughlin: All that’s got to be spelled out, any person who touches that animal needs to be on that protocol. And then there’s training requirements for that. And really, this document functions as a contract. It is exactly as written. And so if, let’s say you’re doing infectious disease model and you wanted to add ten to the 50 E. coli, like, oh, I didn’t get the right dose, I’m just going to do ten to the six.

Levi O’Loughlin: You have to have approval in advance for any change you would make to that. In we’ve set up, if it’s simple change, the veterinarian team can do that. If it’s a bigger change it needs to go through potentially committee or a designated member review again. But any changes need to go through so that when you publish this you can check that box that says, I did this ethically.

Levi O’Loughlin: All these committees are going to look at it typically every three years. If there are no changes, if there are major changes, you submit an amendment and do it differently. I wrote funding implications here because if you make changes, and they’re not approved by the IACUC you do a study with an animal that’s not approved by, the IACUC, this can impact grant funding.

Levi O’Loughlin: We have had to send money back to the NIH before, and we don’t like doing that because these are takes a lot of work to get grant funding. And so we only send it back if it’s done unethically because we don’t want the federal government to pay for anything that may not have been approved by the IACUC.

Levi O’Loughlin: So very important to run it through with them. What I’ve done with this presentation is I’ve also integrated a couple participation things just to make sure you guys are paying attention. This is probably more apt for grad students when I talk to them. And but it can be kind of fun for other researchers and stuff. So I’ll put my first, quiz up here for all of you and

Levi O’Loughlin: the question is, I mean, it’s a little dated now ten years ago, but ten years ago, what is the deadliest animal on the planet? And this is going to be the average annual cause fatalities in the US, not including cars, and it’s not people either.

Levi O’Loughlin: So Lydia put out mosquitoes in the chat, I like that. Any other guesses? The hippopotamus. Very dangerous, but we’re talking volume.

Levi O’Loughlin: I got monkey, I got bats these are great questions. Okay, here’s the data. And again this is Washington Post this isn’t real life science data. But

Levi O’Loughlin: my mosquitoes person, Lydia, you’re spot on. So they’re going to be the most, other mammals could include hippopotamus or, I think that’s the plural of hippopotamus. Monkeys bats., yep they’re all in there. But you typically think of, like, lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my. It’s really the small ones. The one that surprised me is cows have their own category.

Levi O’Loughlin: On average, they killed 20 people. Wow. All right. That’s everything I have for animals. I’m going to move to the next presidential committee, which is Biosafety, or IBC. And so who cares about this same group? The people that give us money, right? CDC can impact our lives. USDA APHIS for anything that would, harm, ag, crop or trees, right?

Levi O’Loughlin: You have funders you have anything that we would consume has various rules. And I would personally help you with any of these kind of rules, but, my team is the research safety program you have me local rules, and then also you. So that said, what the IBC would do is we would, take a look at anything that’s potentially bio hazardous and that’s kind of listed loosely on the left, genetically modified organism.

Levi O’Loughlin: This is going to include anything that has the newer acronyms, like intentionally genetically altered or, anything with a Crispr Cas9 type of modification. And then we have some books that we have to follow. So we would look at safe practices for that. And then we would also look at containment. So, the feds have put parameters for risk group one through four and how that corresponds to containment of biosafety level one labs to biosafety level fours. The highest

Levi O’Loughlin: we have at WSU is a BL-3, which we got a couple of those locations. Those are really the riskiest pathogens we work with at WSU we have no fours. Fours are, highly pathogenic and non treatable. Everything we have could be treated if there was a workplace incident, which is good. And then we have stuff all the way down to BL-1, which is, shouldn’t make

Levi O’Loughlin: a new and incompetent person ill, and it’s fairly low risk, including with plant pathogens as well. So WSU would look at all of these things and how that is accomplished. You guessed it. Another form. So we have a biosafety approval form. This is going to talk about, all the containment, you know, if it’s in a lab, if it’s a field, if it’s a clinic, it’ll have best practices or biosafety cabinets or glove boxes or anything, you know, select agents that BL-3 category has cradle to grave.

Levi O’Loughlin: From the moment we receive it shipped to us, we have to document that we’ve now destroyed it on the back end. So you know it’s autoclaved, it’s incinerated. You wouldn’t believe how much of my job is spent with trying to solve waste problems. And this one’s a little bit different. This. So this isn’t a contract like IACUC.

Levi O’Loughlin: This really is more of, like, a functional overview. We’ll set up curbs or guidelines, being able to, as long as you don’t go beyond this part, you can really do a bunch of experiments you want. So, if you’re we’ll pick an E.coli again. If you’re an E.coli researcher and you want to look at infectious disease, we would put those curbs out.

Levi O’Loughlin: Like as long as you don’t go beyond this, you can do a bunch of different experiments and figure things out. In cell culture or, plating. And so it’s a little bit different, they’re much kinder rules, but I think people care a lot more about critters than they do about bugs. I should say infectious agents, not insects.

Levi O’Loughlin: Clearly we got some insect people here. Still we would have some training there every three years, and then we could potentially send money back. Although historically, WSU’s never had a violation that, required us to send any money back. And I put this here because this often is how it feels. This cartoon. So in some of our shared labs, you have, benches where the middle midline of that was a different lab.

Levi O’Loughlin: And so the example I can give is on the fourth floor of biotech lab science. We used to have, PI there, Ray, and he worked on chlamydia. And then on the other side, they worked on fat metabolism in worms. So very different risks. And so sometimes you have to have good working relationships to make sure that nothing happens.

Levi O’Loughlin: So again, you solve it with the form. Gave examples of this. Maybe you fill a document, we’ll give you a project specific biosafety manual some institutions would give you, you know, here’s every pathogen under the sun that you work with the following things that are applicable. We try to pare that down for you. And we would do the just what was specific to your project.

Levi O’Loughlin: So you’re not playing people and getting things about, you know, animals, animal people and getting anything about plants. They all of the in-betweens all right. We we talked about the specific hazards. And then we’ll actually go through and look at your facilities, and certify that they have the right containment, based on risk. And not all facilities are created equal.

Levi O’Loughlin: We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the older ones, but we still have a couple that can’t do research that you once could. That brings me to this next thing. So this is, an average lab that I’ve walked into, and you can see all of the different things that, you would see. So, anything here that doesn’t look right to you?

Levi O’Loughlin: Maybe, you know, cat sleeping in the window or pizza, this guy pouring in toxic waste down the sink. So all of those. Yeah. Food. Thank you, Ali. You’d be surprised sometimes. But, you know, maybe there’s some security. Maybe we need some maintenance. Maybe we need some procedures here. It was supposed to be done on ice.

Levi O’Loughlin: We want good, research happening. Maybe don’t put an animal right next to your cup coffee. There’s all kinds of things that we could do. The PPE. Ali, I love it. Perfect. So, we would help you with this. And there’s members of IACUC that do this in animal spaces too, but I think people are a lot less, willing to bring food and drink into an animal room than labs.

Levi O’Loughlin: If you have issues with this other, let me know. We’ve been able to provide, spaces outside of laboratories for food and drink because that seems to be the more common one. I get it. I want my cup of coffee as well. At a desk. So we can, we can help come up with creative problems.

Levi O’Loughlin: So we’re halfway through the presidential, presidential committee is the next one is going to be IRB or Institutional Review Board. And these are all the folks that care about humans, right? If you consume something FDA will cares, HHS is going to include all the NIH funded stuff. And then we actually have an office dedicated as well, the Office of Human Research Protections, that give, rules and regulations for how we would conduct this research.

Levi O’Loughlin: We have a team. I think there’s 7 or 8, human protection individuals. And then obviously people doing the work. And when you submit something to the IRB, they’re really looking to, that It benefits human welfare, right? So they’re going to make sure that, there’s respect and that it benefits the people that are doing it.

Levi O’Loughlin: And then that there’s, just so that we’re not picking on one demographic or, singling them out in a way that might cause harm. So really, we’re trying to minimize risk and avoid harm using research. And this doesn’t have to be funded. So as you can imagine, you fill out a form year two. And then that, gets reviewed by a team of subject matter experts, just like the other committees.

Levi O’Loughlin: And the difference here is it’s really hard to work with biohazards or animals without funding, but it turns out it’s really easy to do a survey without those. So, I IRBs volume is much greater than anybody else’s. So it’s regardless of it’s funded or the source, like, well, I’m not going to do this on campus.

Levi O’Loughlin: I’m just going to do it in the community that’s associated with WSU. They want to help you ask the right questions, do the right work. If it’s a survey, if it’s something clinical that’s different or, various trials, they’ll they’ll be able to help you do this. They’re they’re subject matter expertise, is much broader than everywhere else or the other committees.

Levi O’Loughlin: I should say they’re, you know, they’ll have like a Native American expert, they’ll have a prisoner expert there’ll be an MD on there, if needed, to review these studies as well as, all the other various college participants that we would have. So, oops, that’s really it. This also, if they review a project, project, this functions as a contract.

Levi O’Loughlin: So if you’re like, oh, that’s a weird question. I should have worded that differently. You really needed to get them to approve that before you moved with that, because that, consent document that you’re going to have, has to be specific to the questions you’re asking. So, you make changes running back to the IRB, they’re pretty, good and quick about this.

Levi O’Loughlin: And really, we’ve improved those review times over the last, few years to be very competitive with the other institutions out there. All right. Really simple quiz on humans. These are all true or false. Firstborns have higher IQs, blue-eyed people are all going back to the same person. Are people more accident prone than others.

Levi O’Loughlin: Can you quantify that? And then typical adult is enough saliva to fill two bathtubs a year, and the human brain is developed fully by 18. You got your true true true falses all the way down. Here’s all the answers. They’re all true except for the last one. And that pains me because I’m not the firstborn. My oldest brother, loves this first question.

Levi O’Loughlin: I can give you these studies if you want to look at them. They actually are all real science studies.

Levi O’Loughlin: Last presidential committee I’ll talk about, and I should include here, with radiation safety, we partner with the reactor safeguards group as well. So, Janis, would have the reactor safeguards, but really, there’s two different licenses here. The Department of Health, has a radiation safety committee, and we’re an agreement state, so we would cover all research, safety, and, anything that’s outside of our nuclear reactor here in Pullman, that’s on a state license

Levi O’Loughlin: and then the NRC here in this bottom one, they would have, oversight of the reactor, which I have an image of it here. If you’ve never seen the pullman reactor, it’s really cool. They do a nice tour. They have, great programs become reactor operators for students, and it’s really a good opportunity to learn some pretty interesting physics, chemistry and safety operations.

Levi O’Loughlin: What RAD safety does is they typically monitor, exposures and that people may potentially have. So they’re going to look at training and practices for anybody working with radioactive materials. It’s going to be, you know, loose materials if you’re like a radio chemist or, a physicist that needs, to work with radioactivity. They’ll also work with any radiation producing machine.

Levi O’Loughlin: So X-rays, from, you know, the, Cougar gold going through an X-ray machine, we make sure that that has proper shielding. We look at it once a year. Things at the vet school for any of the diagnostics, machine. So we look at all those, we track all of the materials we have, we manage a lot of waste.

Levi O’Loughlin: And then we can either badge you or give you a ring badges, or there’s even fetal bandages around people’s tummies to make sure that the doses that you may get at work are not, beyond what is allowable and would put you in any kind of high hazard, hazardous situation. So if you don’t work with radioactive materials, you don’t have to worry about this.

Levi O’Loughlin: But just know we got it. So the graph I put up here, just to make you think a little bit too, is this was a study, on what causes accidents at work. And they brought three main categories human error, mechanical failure and those beyond control. So human error is typically you’re under confidence or overconfidence under confidence.

Levi O’Loughlin: I like to think of as your new grad student. Overconfidence is probably your postdoc. And then just doing some kind of shortcut, some research. A mechanical failure is going to be anything, you know, whether it’s a facility at WSU or a piece of equipment you’re using that’s faulty or could cause problems and then an act of nature. So, of these three main categories, what do you think is the 88?

Levi O’Loughlin: I’ll answer the question for you, it’s going to be the human error. It’s always you that’s always harping on you and all of those slides. There are, you know, 1 in 10 accidents, statistically is caused by, not necessarily the human, but, the equipment we’re operating, and then 2% would be like an act of God out in nature.

Levi O’Loughlin: Accidents happen. So that’s I’ll pause here before I jump in to export controls and just ask. Those are the four main presidential committees. These truly do go all the way up to Betsy. She has oversight on these, and they take significant resources to operate because you have, faculty and staff that are subject matter experts to assist with this research, but it does capture a good chunk of the work that WSU does.

Levi O’Loughlin: The rest of the slides from this point forward are typically single slides on a topic, to give you some awareness and then have you chase down the external information if you are interested in that. But any questions on presidential committees?

Levi O’Loughlin: Okay. I’ll move on to all of our, Services. And, and that includes other offices throughout WSU. So research, security and export controls kind of get lumped together. Partly because, there’s new rules and regulations that faculty need to disclose any foreign involvement or, any, I guess foreign involvement’s probably really all they need to disclose.

Levi O’Loughlin: But export controls is a little bit broader, where we see export controls, exports are things that United States physically exports or I put down here at the bottom deemed exports. That would be a foreign national national working at WSU on something that would otherwise require an export license. And for the most part, these are things that the US government, doesn’t want to share with other countries, namely countries that are embargoed or the US isn’t friends with.

Levi O’Loughlin: So I think the main, ones you see currently in the news are going to be, both China and Russia. But then there’s also Iran, North Korea, any of those embargoed countries. It doesn’t mean you can’t work with those places or you can receive grad students. We do it frequently. It just means that we might have to have a technology control plan, so that they’re not around something that could be potentially, an export.

Levi O’Loughlin: So we’ll work through that with you. If we typically see this in engineering or physics, because a lot of those have military applications, and that’s really where the US gets the most, fussy about it. So, talk to us if you, have foreign nationals from a country that the US isn’t particularly friendly with, and we can help you with that.

Levi O’Loughlin: We do work closely with sponsor programs, as well as any national programs to make sure that, all that work is good. And for the most part, as long as we intend to publish it, almost all of it falls under the fundamental research exclusion. So we don’t have to worry about it because they gave us, the feds recognize this would be so challenging for universities that they gave us really one big out.

Levi O’Loughlin: As long as we try to publish it, most of the rules don’t apply to us. So next slide is, if you are working as a researcher, typically, front desk people. So whoever would be, you know, downstairs typically or some, point person, it’s almost always an admin that’s been around for a few years. They go, hey, I need to ship this.

Levi O’Loughlin: You need to go out today. We try to centralize that in the Pullman campus. So we have train shippers to help you mail anything that you need to send, even international packages. And they do more than a thousand of these a year. So they’re pretty used to those rules and regulations. And they can help you get it there.

Levi O’Loughlin: As safely, securely as possible. With all of the right, you know, dry ice hasn’t melted or anything like that. If you’re on a different campus, we have train shippers on various campuses. You can still go to this website and we’ll get you the contact information for that person. Or you can call that phone number and we’ll get you some contact information.

Levi O’Loughlin: The all of the campuses have a shipper, some of the extension centers don’t. So we would help you figure out the right way to get your package out. But, yeah, it’s turnkey service. It’s centralized. It doesn’t cost you anything to use us. It does cost. We pass on the cost of what it would cost to mail it, obviously, but, our time is free.

Levi O’Loughlin: But responsible conduct of research here is kind of similar to what I’m talking about now. It kind of goes through all of these different things. That you may face in your research, but it also has a little bit more on data acquisition, and a couple other, relationship aspects so you can find it through the CITI resources.

Levi O’Loughlin: If you click on that, ORSO link down there, that gets you to all of the, training you would need. And we ask that everybody does this every four years or so, every five years. Sorry. If you touch research at all, you should retake take this even if you’re an administrator or faculty. And then the my research database can log all of that for you.

Levi O’Loughlin: I put EHW on here because EHS in my office, we’re pretty closely together. Each of us is going to look at anything outside of the immediate research problem. So they’re going to look at everything from sidewalks being cleaned of snow and ice in the winter to substrates and falls to chemical safety. So they have a lot of resources, really good individuals work there.

Levi O’Loughlin: Click on their link if you work with chemicals, or if you have any questions, concerns about your own, your overall building safety or security. So good team. Another opportunity to do that would be to your, level four safety committees. So the state of Washington has set up, hierarchy that every institution needs, not just academic, but company.

Levi O’Loughlin: Two needs to have a safety committee where individuals can approach somebody and say, hey, this needs to be addressed as hand handrail this, you know, ele- we need an elevator because this isn’t ADA compliant. Anything along those lines, you should all have one at your, college or area for us. Mine is the Office of Research we have a level four

Levi O’Loughlin: and then that pushes up to our vice president for research. All of those committees are talking about those presidential committees. They’re all up here. So that means, you know, even down here at your unit, let’s say your dean says we should do this project. But they voted no. The hierarchy doesn’t allow that because the decisions made here can’t be overturned by anybody down here.

Levi O’Loughlin: This would include chance for that. This, so those committees are pretty important. There’s a link down here. If you don’t know where you reach out to me, I’ll help you track down who should be talking to, SMB, Elanna Driskell. That’s the person you can contact there, and then Bri think, yours, your contact. It’s going to be, probably Jenn Horton.

Brieann Andriesen: That makes sense.

Levi O’Loughlin: Conflict of interest. We have a couple different conflict of interests here. This slide is specific to a financial conflict of interest. So if you have more than $5,000 involved in a venture, we might need a plan. And so you can, run it through the Committee for Financial Conflict of Interest, and they’ll help you look at disclosures and ensure that we’re protecting both you, the participants, the products, so that, your entrepreneurship as a faculty member, is protected.

Levi O’Loughlin: And, you know, are you going to do that startup that you want. The second type of financial, conflict of interest here is really kind of EP45. And so the message here is that even if you disclose, what you’re doing, there may be additional information that you would want to run through our ethics, resources.

Levi O’Loughlin: And so there’s advisors and I just saw Raleigh, joined us all that Raleigh introduce himself here in a second. But you can ask Raleigh any kind of questions on, how do you state resources and the ethical use of things, including even conflict of commitment? So I all at Raleigh jump in. Yeah. Look at he put his

Levi O’Loughlin: Oh gosh, that’s such a simple email ethics@wsu.edu I love it. And then EP45 is there. I have a link down here, to help you get in contact if you follow that the first big button you see is contact an advisor and it’s Raleigh. Raleigh, anything else you would like to say?

Raleigh Hansen: Sure I’ll just add one thing. EP5 does a lot of stuff, but I think the most important out of conflicts is what’s called a scholarly, pre-approval form. There’s a lot of activities that scholars engage in, faculty members engage in that is compensated, that might have like some ethics prohibitions on it. But we have a safe harbor process for that.

Raleigh Hansen: If you are engaged in scholarly activity that you’re being paid for, like if somebody gives you money for a conference or to publish a book or something like that, that pre-approval form allows you to use state resources in support of that work. So if you ever have those questions where you’re receiving external compensation or something, and you want to know if you can get that pre-approval, that safe harbor, please just reach out to me.

Levi O’Loughlin: That’s perfect. Thank you so much. I’ll add that to the next round of this presentation. That’s very helpful information. And I found this cartoon. It just made me laugh. Hopefully it does you too. All right. On the training. So, the feedback I get on training is there’s so much of there, and there is, because there’s a lot of things that you need to know.

Levi O’Loughlin: So for the research side, we do all kinds of, CITI courses. So that has, everything from export controls to, biosafety to, IACUC animal welfare, and then, that are responsible conduct of research RCR and so that’s all in there. It gets logged into the my research database. But then other aspects of training are all in Percipio on the HRS’s website.

Levi O’Loughlin: So this would have all of your compliance related, you know, cybersecurity discrimination and annual trainings. So all of that is in there. Take a look at those. Sometimes HRS will assign you, but it’s a wealth of information to have additional, training resources in them.

Levi O’Loughlin: Next slide here is on, the public records and state ethics. So two things, our vice president for risk management wanted me to highlight here. One is that WSU counts as open government. And so I put a definition there. This is straight from, our state legislator. It’s really, anybody who serves the public. And that’s what we are.

Levi O’Loughlin: We’re a public servants working at the, at Washington State University. What that means, though, is that the tools we use to do our job can be, requested by members through a public records request. So use your computers or emails, all those things at for work. Don’t use them for other things outside of de minimis use. The question I typically get here is on cell phone uses, if it’s duplicating what is on your work machine, that is fine.

Levi O’Loughlin: If it is used only as a cell phone, then that could be potentially publicly requested. Our office does a really good job. They can redact some information, but, never we, I don’t own the machine I’m using currently, right. The state does. So, use it responsibly. The second is we do state ethics trainings, and then this will be through Percipio as well.

Levi O’Loughlin: And we’ll just let you know about all the stuff that we talked about. Improper state use, resources is conflicts of interest. And I put that link to, Frozen two I don’t know if you know it. The whole point of that movie is do the next right thing, and it’s so simple. But I don’t know if we always agree on what the next right thing is, and we probably do with state ethics though.

Levi O’Loughlin: So there’s some websites down here if you have, in if you want to dive in a little bit deeper on that. Research misconduct is one other aspect that falls under my purview. My new deputy research integrity officer. So if you have any, potential integrity issues with the research data itself, I will be your first conversation.

Levi O’Loughlin: And for the most part, this is a very narrow definition. It’s FFP. It’s the fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism. That’s really what falls under research misconduct. I can help you with detrimental research, questions or questionable research practices, but that doesn’t necessarily fall under this purview. The RM rules that we have are straight from NIH. And, they, they really dictate how we do this process. It’s very process heavy.

Levi O’Loughlin: So if you have anything questionable, I’d love to have a conversation before it reaches to the level of research misconduct so that we can correct it, because otherwise the process is designed to take at least six months. It’s the same process for a grad student as it is for an emeritus faculty or regents faculty member. So it’s a lot of people involved, including the provost, who is the decision maker.

Levi O’Loughlin: So, yeah, talk to me if you have any concerns, because I’d love to solve the problems before it got too serious. We’re close to the end here. I always put up a faculty departure here. This is just if you’re going to leave, a lab, whether it’s to change locations at WSU, or it’s to move to a new institution or retire, please use this form to check out.

Levi O’Loughlin: This lets us know if we have to come in and, clean up anything with RAD use or, biohazardous materials or chemicals. And really what this prevents your department from doing is paying a penalty. So if you let us know, we’ll help do it before you’re gone. If this happens afterwards, a lot of times we have to charge because we don’t know what the materials are, so they end up being shipped out and disposed of pretty much the most expensive way possible.

Levi O’Loughlin: So these forms really help us know what the hazards are we’re handling so that we can solve it as efficiently and really cost effective as possible.

Levi O’Loughlin: The last content slide here is Tech Transfer or Office of Commercialization. And really what they’ll help you do is if you have a startup company or if you have any, invention you want to disclose or something, they’ll work with you to move it from an idea to an actual, product or, company. So talk to them for any of this tech transfer of any of the cool discoveries that we make in our research.

Levi O’Loughlin: The last quiz I have for you, can you identify all of these acronyms?

Levi O’Loughlin: So I got a for presidential committees here, but then TLA and FLA? That’s actually just three letter acronym and FLA is four letter acronym. Bad joke. That’s the end of my presentation. Cheryl will send out the slide deck to all of you that participated. That way you can click on those links live. You know, I do animal work.

Levi O’Loughlin: I need this one. Take a look at the web pages that are built to really assist research there. But also stick around if there’s any questions, for the sake of the group or if you want to schedule a time to talk about a certain,

Levi O’Loughlin: research question at all. So, feel free to come off mute or, put something in the chat.

Levi O’Loughlin: Otherwise, thank you for participating and, good luck with the important research you do here.