CSDE is inviting applications for its 3rd annual Summer Grant Writing Program – a chance for you to learn more about NIH grant-writing and to workshop your proposal with other participants and with experienced senior faculty. Writing a grant in isolation can be mystifying—instead, we aim to create a group experience that is still hard work, but which will be supportive, fun, productive, and ultimately rewarding.
If you’ve been on the fence about writing a proposal, now is the time to dive in!
Full information and the application instructions and form are at: https://csde.washington.edu/research/csde-grant-writing-summer-program/.
In brief, participants will develop proposals over the course of the summer, with support and reviews from senior mentors, other participants, and the program coordinator Steve Goodreau.
Who is eligible to apply? All CSDE affiliates (local or regional) are eligible to apply. UW students and post-docs are eligible to apply only if they plan a training grant centered at UW. Applications from collaborative teams, anticipating a multiple PI arrangement, are also encouraged.
New this year—we are requesting that applicants include a letter demonstrating some form of matching support from their unit (department/school/center/college/etc.) This can take many forms, including some summer salary, research expenses, or RA support, all paid directly from the unit to the participant. Please consider this request early in order to leave time to arrange for a letter demonstrating this support.
Applications are due Friday, May 8 at 6 pm PDT.
Please email Development Core Director Steve Goodreau (goodreau@uw.edu) with any questions!
“Can’t I please just visit one friend?” is a question that many of us have asked during social distancing. Nevertheless, in a website that visualizes social networks, CSDE Affiliates Steven Goodreau and Martina Morris demonstrate how visiting “just one friend” can undo the work of measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The website depicts multiple network simulations of a 200 households community using the programming language R.
While visiting “just one friend” may seem harmless, Goodreau and Morris’ simulations demonstrate how 71% of households can easily become connected if only some households establish social connections with others—consequently, each of these connections is an opportunity for the virus to spread.
As Morris emphasized in last week’s NYT article on COVID transmission, she stated for UW News that “with COVID-19, many types of connections can transmit the virus…what we show is that you don’t need superspreaders to create network connectivity for transmission; visiting just one friend is equally effective for connecting a community into one large cluster.”
Goodreau and Morris’ website and simulations have been featured in multiple recent news articles in UW News, the New York Times, KIRO 7, Medium, and KUOW/NPR. Additionally, CSDE Student Emily Pollock and research scientists Jeanette Birnbaum and Deven Hamilton collaborated with Goodreau and Morris on this project. In Goodreau’s words, “This was a quick time-sensitive effort, but it builds upon years and years of work by the Network Modeling Group, all made possible by CSDE’s strong research infrastructure and intellectual community.”
The first PAA2020-V real time sessions begin Thursday, April 23. Click here for a list of sessions that will take place in real time. Each link on this list will take you to the sessions’ page in the online/mobile app, and from there you can find each session’s zoom or other platform link, which are not posted directly online for security reasons. You can also click on a session in the schedule section of the online app for that information, which will also allow you to see which sessions will be asynchronous. Please note that some sessions require preregistration and some sessions require passwords.
Real Time Session List l Session Schedule l Virtual PAA Information Page
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) are collaborating on two survey item repositories. Researchers are encouraged to use these platforms (NIH Public Health Emergency and Disaster Research Response (DR2) and PhenX Toolkit) to enhance research capacities for comparative insights and to advance knowledge more efficiently and effective.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, researchers with existing longitudinal cohorts and survey samples have been developing and fielding new survey items assessing various COVID-19 specific domains such as symptoms, knowledge and attitudes, adherence to various mitigation behaviors, social impacts, and economic impacts. Efforts to standardize or harmonize COVID-19 survey items, however, did not appear feasible given the urgency to field items as early as possible during the pandemic.
To minimize the proliferation of one-off survey items, encourage comparisons across samples, and facilitate data integration and collaboration, a trans-NIH working group co-led by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) worked to make existing COVID-19 survey items and investigator contact information available in a survey item repository. Two NIH-supported survey item platforms have made this expanding list of survey items available as a resource for researchers interested in assessing COVID-19 specific domains.
— NIH Public Health Emergency and Disaster Research Response (DR2): The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) host the DR2 site which now includes a list of COVID-19 surveys and the domains assessed in the surveys. In addition to this COVID-19 list, DR2 provides a wide array of data collection tools and resources used in other public health emergencies and disasters, providing researchers with a rich repository of survey and other measurement tools that are applicable to the COVID-19 pandemic.
— PhenX Toolkit: The PhenX Toolkit now includes a list of COVID-19 related measurement protocols drawn from the surveys listed in DR2. These COVID-19 survey protocols have not been vetted as per the PhenX consensus process but are made available for other researchers to consider, and to test as needed, before incorporating in their research studies. The PhenX Toolkit, funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and other NIH Institutes and Centers (see list here), has a large collection of well-established and vetted measurement protocols suitable to incorporate into studies involving COVID-19.
Researchers addressing COVID-19 questions, whether population-based or for clinical research, are encouraged to consider these COVID-19 specific survey item repositories and select existing survey items or protocol modules currently being fielded. Researchers with additional survey items about to be fielded are encouraged to make them public for other researchers to consider by submitting the survey to NIHCOVID19Measures@nih.gov.
The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a Notice of Special Interest soliciting research proposals that aim to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting minority health and health disparities. In particular, the institute is interested in understanding how state and local public health policies affect health disparities, the role protective interventions may have in mitigating health disparities that COVID-19 may cause, and how behavioral or biological mechanisms may contribute to the spread of COVID-19. This notice is one of many coming out of the institutes and centers at NIH as the agency has been tapped by Congress in the COVID-19 stimulus bills to focus on research addressing the ongoing pandemic (read COSSA’s analysis for more details).
Applications for this notice are due May 1, 2020. More information can be found on the NIH website.
On April 9, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Board on Higher Education and Workforce (BHEW) hosted the first event in a new virtual series discussing post-secondary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion series, which will take place over the course of several weeks, will bring together leaders from academia, industry, government, and civil society to address new developments in COVID-19 responses in different sectors of the research community. Each virtual event will touch on a specific topic on how researchers and their institutions can help support public health efforts. The next event is April 22 and there is one each week through out the month. Sign up for the series at the Eventbrite page.
The April 9 event, which focused on how researchers help the national response efforts, featured a panel discussion among Lisa Hirshhorn, Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University; Michael Wells, Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University and creator of the COVID-19 National Scientist Volunteer Database; Amy McDermott, science journalist for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Matthew Golden, Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington and Director of the Public Health Seattle King County HIV/STD program. Topics brought up during the discussion included the role of scientists as communicators to policymakers and health care professionals, barriers to COVID-19 research and what to be done to mitigate them, the curation of the COVID-19 National Scientist Volunteer Database, and long-term strategies for mobilizing scientists against COVID-19.
Future events in the discussion series will focus on topics such as how labs can shift research agendas, how scientists can be crowd-sourced to improve public information, how to provide faster policy advice, how to volunteer for the response effort, the implications of the global nature of the pandemic, and possible long term implications of postsecondary responses to the pandemic. More details about each event in the series and recordings of previous series discussions are available on the NASEM Eventbrite page.
For those of you with interests in researching the economic impacts of COVID-19, you may be interested to know that the Census Bureau was granted authority from the Office of Management and Budget to add COVID-19 questions to its business surveys. The posting of this authorization is here. Questions to measure the impact of the pandemic will be added to five surveys: the Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories & Orders (M3) Survey; the Building Permits Survey; the Monthly Wholesale Trade Survey; the Monthly Retail Surveys; and the Quarterly Services Survey. The Census Bureau will be asking businesses whether they have temporarily closed any locations for at least one day, whether they experienced delays in their supply chains or product shipments, and whether those delays impacted revenue. In addition, the Building Permits Survey will ask permit offices whether they were unable to issue permits due to COVID-19-related disruptions, whether such disruptions created a permit backlog, and whether backlogs were cleared. In its justification to OMB, the Census Bureau said: “The added questions are designed to allow us to measure the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic upon businesses.
The German Historical Institute issued a call for papers for the annual academic and policy symposium, “Contested Meanings of Migration Facilitation: Emigration Agents, Coyotes, and Human Traffickers.” The symposium will explore migration facilitation as situated between securing borders, solidarity networks, and economic interests or needs. It brings together Germany-based professionals from the academic, cultural, activist, and policy sectors as well as colleagues the United States working in similar contexts. In order to address the complexities and contingencies of migration facilitation, the symposium seeks to make comparisons across time and space since the nineteenth century. To do this, they welcome proposals from a wide range of disciplines, including history, ethnic studies, migration studies, political science, sociology, and law.
The Center for Migration Studies of New York has compiled a page on its website that summarizes the US and global COVID-19 migration-related developments. This page includes policy developments, CMS policy analysis, research, and dispatches about the coronavirus. As the pandemic develops, this page will be updated.