Research committee addresses need to evaluate, update Pitt policies

By SHANNON O. WELLS

How long has Pitt’s Centers and Institute Policy been in place? You could say it was established five or six presidential administrations ago, but Rob Rutenbar perhaps put it in a starker context when he noted that the policy “predates the emergence of the World Wide Web.”

“You want to think about that for a minute? There’s not even an obligation to have a working webpage,” the senior vice chancellor for research observed. “So it’s like, ‘OK, we can do better. We can do a lot better.’”

As in examining the complex — and in some cases rather antiquated — web of University policies, centers and institutes to determine what’s effective, what’s ineffective, what should stay, what should go, and what could be restructured. Those are among the goals of a fledgling Pitt policy committee, for which Senate Council President Robin Kear has asked the Senate Research committee for faculty volunteers.

In the Research committee’s March 17 meeting, Rutenbar elaborated that the decades-old Centers & Institutes policy’s governance architecture references positions “that don’t exist anymore,” and predates the “spin out of UPMC” as well as the emergence of the School of Medicine and Pitt Health Sciences “as a big, kind of powerful constellation of activities.” The policy, he added, also makes assumptions about budget models, including the Research Development Fund, which under the ReSTART budget model no longer exists. “So it’s just, like a maximum mess.”

With the ultimate goal of revisiting policies and policy structures that have slipped into obscurity or irrelevance, Rutenbar said he’s created a narrative to address such questions as “What are best practices that other universities have for doing this kind of stuff? How do these things get managed? What are the landmines that you can step on? I can even cite examples of other universities that stepped on them and what happened and how did they fix it.”

As Rutenbar explained, some university centers and institutes have a natural lifespan and can become irrelevant when “the topic becomes uninteresting, the lead faculty member retires, gets poached by Harvard, or dies. I mean, stuff happens,” he said. “So this is actually a nice opportunity for us to get organized around this topic.”

Several Research committee members, including co-chair Melanie Scott, expressed interest in serving on the policy committee and encouraged others to join if interested.

Funding journey to Capitol Hill

In other Research committee news, Melanie Scott shared her “really great experience” going to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., lobbying the National Institutes of Health for more funding for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).

“And I would really encourage everybody if they have the opportunity to go and do something like this,” she said of her first in-person experience with Capitol meetings. “So it was really great, actually, to see how things work on the Hill and who’s there and where all the offices are.”

Scott said the overall message from the federation was more funding, and sustained funding, for the NIH. “They’re actually proposing a level of $51 billion, which is above (President Biden’s) requested budget level, and also an increase for the (National Science Foundation) in line with the CHIPS and Science Act. That’s what FASEB is asking for, as well as other organizations that fund research,” such as the Department of Energy, USDA and Veterans Affairs, “that sort of thing.”

Federal research security guidelines

Rutenbar discussed the “long, complicated” process of the federal government “changing the legal landscape” after the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Biden signed into law that stipulates new research security requirements for U.S. government-funded investigators.

“The Trump administration put out a national security memo around research security at the end of the administration. The Biden administration came in and hit pause,” Rutenbar explained. “And then when they put the Office of Science and Technology Policy together, they brought it back because it was actually not an unreasonable sort of thing. They put up sort of a ‘Let’s get some guidance together on how we want to go after this,’ and then that came out.”

While Rutenbar admitted “we still don’t know where this is going to land, but we have a pretty good general sense of it,” he said, referring to a Pitt visit by the NSF’s Rebecca Keiser last fall. “I see her at all these big events in Washington, and Mike Lauer, the person who runs it on the NIH side … we’re talking with him all the time.”

Rutenbar said the federal guidance is “probably not going to be super prescriptive. It’s going to be a little bit more, ‘You need to do this’ kind of stuff. ‘Let us know how you do it,’ which is good and bad. The good thing is, it’s not like 400 lines of what you have to do. The bad news is we have to figure out how we are complying with this. So we have a pretty good idea of what we’re doing, and we’re going to be pulling the trigger on announcing some stuff at campus scale.”

Essentially, the new federal language means researchers will need to add research security elements to their Responsible Conduct of Research training guidelines because “managing the security of your research is now part of your responsible conduct of research,” Rutenbar noted.

“Just like the feds are kind of harmonizing this stuff across research agencies, we are going to have to harmonize this stuff across upper and lower campus,” he said. “So the fact that you have NIH funding has meant that you did it one way and the fact that you have NSF funding has meant that you had done it a different way. That’s not going to be OK anymore, because we now have these broad-spectrum requirements for everybody.

“So we’re going to end up pulling this stuff in a bit more centrally and trying to figure out what is the most efficient, most effective thing we can have everybody do,” he added. “And how often? Probably annually, which I know won’t make people happy, but given how fast the feds keep changing the rules …”

Bill Yates, vice chancellor for research protections, noted that the “most onerous” of the proposed rules is a foreign travel registration requirement, currently written as applying to any foreign travel. “And remember, this is a proposed rule, not a final rule … a lot of people think that’s just a little overkill, which will require registration of your foreign travel, review of your foreign travel and counseling potentially about security risks of your foreign travel.

“And that’s the one that I think is going to be the toughest to implement unless they change it,” Yates added. “And I bet they’re gonna get a lot of comments about that one, and they may well change it before it’s implemented.”

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

 

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