Rosa Is Still Planning to Be the Liaison Between the QDC Meeting and the PD-FLC Group

Minutes Rosa is still planning to be the liaison between the QDC meeting and the PD-FLC group. In the fifth paragraph, Jennifer Kaplan asked for clarification on the timeline for dissemination of materials for the statistics arm of the project, which is separate from the biology arm of the project. The minutes were accepted after those two clarifications.

Supplemental Funding A Google doc was created last week for everyone to add in their requests for funding. Maine is in the process of hiring a new faculty member, and Michelle is interested in asking her to participate. The contract is not yet signed so she is unable to name this potential participant. Mark changed the document to reflect “cannot reveal name.” At UGA, one of our potential FLC participants took a job elsewhere and Paula is looking into two other faculty members. Mark emphasized that we should be adding people who have expressed interest in the FLC and we shouldn’t be actively recruiting folks.

Ross has not updated the document yet to reflect requests for funding at Stonybrook. Mark is waiting to fill in the MSU request until everyone else has filled in theirs. He did say that there will be some personnel changes occurring at MSU in the near future: Mihwa will be leaving at the end of June and they will possibly be hiring another postdoc with training in biology. This potential hire is interested in the development of new biology questions.

At the QDC meeting yesterday (5/31), Jennifer Kaplan said there was a possibility of including her collaborator at Iowa State. There, all of the instructors who teach statistics meet regularly and have done so for 15 years. Mark is wondering if this is something worth studying or if it’s too different of a setup. Jill asked for clarification; this group at Iowa State has been meeting regularly to just discuss the course. She then said that at UGA and somewhat at MSU the FLCs have been functioning as a sort of meetup group to get the faculty who teach the same courses together. Is this the same thing?

Jennifer has been developing AACR questions in statistics and her colleague Amy from Iowa State has been actively participating in the QDC meetings. If we were to expand the idea of an FLC to take lessons learned and use those to form new FLCs, could we use the statistics group at Iowa State as a starting point? Also, Mark wanted opinions on reaching out to statistics groups at our own institutions. Paula asked if this is beyond the scope of the TUES, and yes this is the case. It is beyond the scope of the original work, which is part of the requirement for supplemental funding. Paula then asked how that would work, as we also want to expand more on the biology side. Do we have enough funds to do both? Mark thinks we should try to add more biology faculty and think about expanding into statistics. Michelle brought up two points: 1) we need funding for postdocs and research assistants, and 2) she is concerned about taking on too much by including statistics faculty at Maine.

Jill asked if it was worth thinking about writing another grant to cover the statistics portion because there likely won’t be enough funding to expand the biology project as well as statistics. Right now, Mark just wants a reasonable set of ideas so we have a place to start with our supplemental request. Mark also pointed out that the statistics FLC would be built upon the work we have already done with the biology faculty. Michelle thinks it is an interesting research question, but she is concerned with all the data we would have to collect and analyze if we added a statistics group. How much handholding would the faculty need? Does somebody want to study this?

Paula put in the UGA section of the document some research questions that are beyond the scope of the project. These new research questions expand on what we have learned. We have already learned some things and we should set up the FLCs differently to reflect what we have already learned. We have some ideas about how to make the learning curve shorter, and this is beyond the scope of the original project. We know that the FLC is working, but we could address common concerns. Should we try out our model in statistics?

As for current funding, we have had close to two full-time researchers and we need to keep this level of staffing in order to keep making progress. However, the funding for these workers has not fully come from AACR, so we need to keep that in mind with future funding requests.

Luanna asked about the FLC model from the grant. Each is supposed to have faculty, the expert, and some administrative support. She is concerned because she doesn’t have the statistics background to serve as that expert and neither does Michelle. Would that affect the FLCs themselves as well as the study? Mark agreed; Jennifer Kaplan could serve as the leader at UGA and Amy at Iowa State, but if we were to do this at Maine we would have to get somebody to lead the FLC. This would require getting a statistics expert up to speed on AACR.

John Merrill pointed out that we may not need this in the same time frame because there are still a lot of question development to complete. The only reason to have this as a supplement vs. a new grant is because statistics is part of the current overall project. There are a lot of unknowns and it is very difficult to know what the model will look like in the future.

Michelle had a general question about supplements. How different does the request have to be? She also pointed out that we have done a lot already that isn’t in the original proposal, like COPUS. Mark clarified that we can’t just ask for more money because we are running out of money to do what we originally said we would do. It would be useful to identify what we are currently doing that is beyond the original proposal already, due to the savings that came from combining the two grants. Talking about maintaining the current research is fine, as long as we are clear that some of this work is beyond the original project in the first place. Once Myles has looked at the draft he can let us know what he is most interested in supporting, which we can use as a guide for our formal request.

In the document, Michelle requested a research associate and two new FLC members or three new FLC members. Mark wondered if there is a conflict with having Karen switch roles to FLC participant. He also asked Michelle to detail how the money was acquired to pay Karen in the first place and then describe what she did. This will help justify the need for money to pay research associates. Mark asked Luanna to do the same thing so that we have a rough idea of what we all need. Right now she needs an undergrad or two to do COPUS observations. Jenny and Ross have not yet filled out the document.

Mark will be gone next week as will Michelle, so this will be discussed again in two weeks. Mary Anne asked for clarification on how much we can request. We are able to ask for 20% of each grant. Curriculum Development Karen is hoping to present some data in the spring from the central dogma activity. She is available to do this as early as two weeks from now (6/24). As a teaser, Karen said that the gains from spring semester were almost double the learning gains from the fall.