Month: January 2013

Grassroots Group Tackles Funding

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The Emory Sponsor-Investigator Association (ESIA) was founded in 2012 by Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology Jacques Galipeau. Galipeau spoke at the January 15 Faculty Council meeting about his efforts to engage faculty who pursue translational research—that is, science aimed to go “from bench-top to bedside.” “Industry and NIH sponsored clinical trials here at Emory have declined,” he said. “This is a trend nationally, and it is a real threat. Clinicial trials are the meat and potatoes of Emory’s translational research enterprise. Everybody’s been dumped on Survivor Island.” In response, he founded the ESIA to serve as an advocate for Emory investigators who do sponsored research, to coordinate efforts and share resources, and to facilitate communication. The ESIA now boasts 146 members and has hosted three workshops. “I think the great untapped resource is scholarly engagement,” he said. Council President Gray Crouse commended the grass- roots-style faculty initiative, saying, “I would hope to see this emulated in other areas of the university, where people can get together and actually do things they couldn’t individually.”

 

 Online courses and intellectual property

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In the January meeting, Alan Cattier, director of academic technology services, described to the Faculty Council new questions about intellectual property ownership taking shape with the quickly developing array of online courses and classroom capture technology. As knowledge and what Cattier termed “micro-lessons,” salient points or material conveyed in class, become increasingly available and distributable through online technologies at Emory and elsewhere, “faculty are shopping content that not only they create but maybe others have created that illustrate a point or an idea better than they’ve ever been able to illustrate in their content,” Cattier said. “There’s a marketplace emerging.” He outlined three major questions: “Who owns the rights to an online course? Who owns the rights to a class recording? Who owns the rights to a learning object? There isn’t a large body of evidence or discussion around these questions yet because we are all on this incredibly quick treadmill of change in the educational environment.” Faculty representatives from the Instructional Subcommittee for IT Governance will be looking at these questions of intellectual property and digital objects and reporting back to the Council.

 

Around Campus: Training Medical Residents

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Associate Professor of Neurology Jaffar Khan spoke to the Council in January about efforts in the School of Medicine to prepare for training medical residents in a new, rapidly changing healthcare practice environment. The combination of rising healthcare costs and the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have resulted in transformations already beginning to occur. “In the future landscape of healthcare, the practice of medicine is going to change dramatically as we go forward in the next five years,” Khan said. He outlined a strategic planning initiative coordinated by Emory’s Graduate Medical Education office to address issues associated with traning new physicians. Task forces are probing a broad range of topics, including assuring Emory’s compliance with training requirements and guidelines regulating residency education, healthcare safety, and physician practices based on quality.