Beginning Monday, June 22 - Friday, June 26, U-M will host eight visitors from the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) to conduct a site visit of our animal research program. During this time, anticipate a visit to all housing locations on every campus and many laboratories.   

All laboratory or research groups conducting research or teaching with animals should take all necessary steps to prepare for the visit, including:

The U-M Office of Research and the University Committee on Use and Care of Animals (UCUCA) Office will continue to share additional information regarding the visit. 

Use this form to submit any questions you may have about the upcoming site visit or how to prepare your laboratory staff.

In recent weeks, U-M staff members across campus have reported an increase in phishing scam emails and pop-ups warning that their computers are infected. While these scams are not new, they have increased in number as they've become specifically targeted at U-M.

These are the most recent scams that have been circulating:

• IRS Information Validation Scam. These emails ask people to validate personal information, such as Social Security Number, by entering it on a Google Form. The information is being collected by criminals. (See IRS scam example at U-M) 
• Academic Publishing Scam. These emails ask faculty to share articles by clicking links that require login to get to online copies of the articles. The login page is a fake one that steals the faculty member's uniqname and UMICH password. (See Academic Publishing scam example at U-M) 
• School Mail-Box Validation Scam. These emails warn people that email accounts that have not been validated by a certain date will be deleted, and ask that people click on the link to re-validate their email. These emails may appear to come from the Umich Servicedesk or Umich Helpdesk.
• Infected Computer Pop-Up Warning. Several staff members have reported seeing alarming pop-ups warning that their computer is infected. The pop-ups, which block browser use and may include audio, urge the user to call a phone number for tech support assistance. The call is answered by someone who offers to fix the problem for
  a fee but who hijacks the computer in the process.
  (See Tech Support Scam Example) 

It's important that you remain especially vigilant and report any suspicious email or computer activity. You're also encouraged to share this information with your colleagues and to take the following precautionary steps: 

Please refer to the "IIA Alert: Beware of phishing scams circulating at U-M" message posted on the Safe Computing website for more information. ­­­

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) is currently seeking applicants for the following awards: 

• Career Awards for Medical Scientists (CAMS)   
• Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease (PATH) 

Important Procedural Change
These awards no longer require institutional nomination of applications, and now have a self-nomination process that will remove the limit on applications an institution can submit. Since this change is expected to increase the number of applications, the BWF is moving to a two-stage competition. Each award will have a pre-proposal deadline, followed by a deadline for invited full proposals. 

Career Awards for Medical Scientists (CAMS)

Investigators in the Pathogenesis
of Infectious Disease (PATH)

Questions about either of these opportunities should be directed to Joe Piffaretti in UMHS Corporate and Foundation Relations or Camille Mrozowski in the Medical School Office of Research.

Did you know that there is a new Epigenomics Core? Have you been wanting to contact the DNA Sequencing Core to discuss pros and cons of targeted gene panels? Or perhaps you need to schedule a time on an instrument in the Microscopy & Image Analysis Lab?

This Thursday you'll have a unique opportunity to answer these questions and network with all of the Biomedical Research Core Facilities (BRCF) and more than 25 of their partner vendors at the Fourth Annual BRCF Technology & Services Showcase:

Visit the event website for a full list of participating vendors and Core exhibitors.

Due to recently announced changes in
NIH financial support, MICHR's Michigan Clinical Research Unit (MCRU) is updating its cost structure for both industry-sponsored and investigator-initiated research studies, effective Wednesday,
July 1, 2015, in order to continue as a key clinical and translational research service provider.

MCRU staff is available to help research teams create or update budgets based on the new cost structure. Please contact Dr. Blake Roessler or Administrative Program Director Cyndi Bower with any questions.

Join the Medical School Office of Research and the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research as they host a workshop for research leadership, "The Pittsburgh Model: Building a Collaborative and Productive Research Environment," on Wednesday, July 22 from 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM in the Kahn Auditorium of the Biomedical Science Research Building. 

The event features David Kupfer, M.D., the former Chair of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Pittsburgh, who will speak about his work in the past three decades to build a strong department-based infrastructure that fosters research excellence and a collaborative culture.

In recent years, his department has been consistently ranked No. 1 in NIH funding among psychiatry departments nationwide. Such success is, in part, the result of the department's mandatory peer-review program for proposal development, a strong collaborative culture, and formal mentoring mechanisms.

Click here for additional details and registration information. 

Rudi Ansbacher Women in Academic Medicine Leadership Scholars Program 

The U-M Medical School is currently seeking nominations for the second cohort of the Rudi Ansbacher Women in Academic Medicine Leadership Scholars Program.

This intensive 18-month leadership development program is designed to accelerate the development of women for senior leadership positions in academic medicine and healthcare. Developed in partnership with Linkage, Inc. and U-M's Stephen M. Ross School of Business, the program will provide individuals with insights about their leadership strengths and challenges to facilitate self-awareness and opportunities for growth.

Click on image above to view a brief video about ORCID.

For many of us, sharing a common name with thousands of others might be an occasional inconvenience, or a source of frustration when Googling ourselves. But for researchers like U-M's Jennifer Smith, the implications are a little more serious. Smith is an assistant research scientist in epidemiology at the School of Public Health, but in PubMed, a search engine with more than 24 million citations, there are 20,000 entries for J. Smith, and no clear way to distinguish one J. Smith from another.

Thanks to a U-M Library initiative, soon all of the university's researchers will have a unique identifier via membership in ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), a non-profit organization working to reliably identify and link researchers with their work. 

Key features of ORCID include:

The library is currently in the process of creating ORCID ID numbers for all U-M researchers and, upon integration, ORCID numbers will appear in MCommunity listings in a new section labeled "Professional Information." 

To learn more about the U-M Library's ORCID initiative and implementation, visit the ORCID Research Guide or click on the image above to view a brief informational video.

If you have any questions or would like additional information about ORCID, please contact Merle Rosenzweig in the Taubman Health Sciences Library at [email protected]. 

Dr. Christine Nelson, Department of Ophthamology and Visual Sciences, receives outstanding mentor award from her UROP student Jane Smith during the Spring Research Symposium.

This year, the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) will admit more than 1,000 students ready to start working on research projects in September 2015 and continuing through April 2016.

The program needs additional lab, clinical, and public health projects for the upcoming academic year. 

What is UROP? 

UROP is a structured program. In addition to working on their research project, UROP students attend bi-weekly seminars addressing a variety of research topics, meet regularly with their UROP peer advisor who is an alumnus of the program, and are offered skill-building workshops and other resources.

UROP is not a match program. Instead, UROP provides a list of approved projects and interested students contact the researcher directly. As the researcher, YOU decide who you want to interview and who you want to offer the position to.

There is no financial cost to you. Supplemental funding of $500 - $1000 per project is available for student-related research costs.

Eligibility

U-M clinical and research faculty, research investigators, fellows, and visiting scholars who will be on campus September 2015 through April 2016 are eligible to apply for help. 

How to Apply 

If you could use help with your current research project, collecting pilot data, or exploring a related topic, please fill out the brief online application. 

Projects submitted by the end of June will have top priority. Project applications will be accepted through mid-August for distribution to the entire cohort of UROP students.

If you have questions, please contact the UROP Office via email or phone at (734) 615-9000.

Click on image to view and download infographic.

The Mentored Research Academy: R01 Boot Camp (R01 Boot Camp),
now in its second year, is a multi-tiered mentorship program to support and increase the success rate of Medical School faculty applying for their first NIH Research Project Grant (R01).

Managed by the Medical School Office of Research and developed as part of Dean Woolliscroft's long-term Strategic Research Initiative, the R01 Boot Camp pilot program launched in 2013 with 40 mentees.

To date, pilot program mentees have produced:  

In preparing to submit their NIH R01 applications, mentees participate in several activities to develop and review their proposals. They also receive individual counsel on their research plans from subject matter experts and their faculty coaches. 

Several mentees from the pilot program have continued with R01 Boot Camp 1.2 to prepare their A1 or new R01 application(s) in response to the NIH summary sheets they received. A second cohort comprised of 48 new mentees began R01 Boot Camp 2.0 in fall 2014.

A new session of the program is expected to be announced later this year, with application instructions to follow. Please visit the R01 Boot Camp webpage for more information, or contact us via email at [email protected].

You return home from delivering a paper at a conference, and before you can even finish unpacking you start to receive unsolicited emails about your paper. An editor promises impossibly fast peer review, asking you to submit your work to a publication with a vague name, or one that is strikingly similar to another journal in your field.

Perhaps you've never received these appeals, but you've heard from colleagues who were duped into submitting their work to fake journals, or maybe you've found your name listed on the editorial board of a journal you've never heard of. Situations like these bear all the hallmarks of predatory publishing, and are becoming increasingly common.

Predatory publishing mimics the system of academic publishing, but in the service of generating revenue rather than advancing scholarship. These fake publishers and journals seek to use your name, reputation, and scholarship to make their activities appear legitimate in order to fool others into falling for their scheme. Thankfully, with a careful eye you can learn to recognize these scams before becoming their next victim.

Here are a few tips to help you avoid the predators: 

For more information about how to avoid predatory publishers, please contact the Taubman Health Sciences Library at [email protected] or (734) 764-1210.

The clinical research team of Rodica Pop-Busui, M.D., Ph.D., was recently recognized for excellence in study recruitment for the Preventing Early Renal Function Loss in Type 1 Diabetes (PERL) Trial by the PERL Executive Committee and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive & Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). The PERL Trial is funded by the NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health.

The U-M clinical research team and its affiliate sub-site at Henry Ford Health System were acknowledged for recruiting the largest number of subjects in the study among all the research sites, as well as for exceeding the study quota by more than double during the first four months of this year.

The University of Michigan is one of the lead academic institutions

participating in the PERL Consortium, which includes Harvard's Joslin Diabetes Center, the University of Minnesota, the Barbara Davis Center at the University of Colorado, Northwestern University, the University of Toronto, and the Steno Diabetes Center in Denmark.

The PERL study is a five-year double-blind randomized clinical trial evaluating whether allopurinol, an inexpensive and safe FDA-approved drug for another metabolic disease (gout), is effective in reducing kidney function loss among people with type 1 diabetes.