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September 17, 2014 | ||
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| Society News GSA is pleased to announce the results of the elections to our Board of Directors:
This is your last chance to nominate deserving individuals who represent the breadth and strength of genetics for the 2015 GSA Awards. Honor your outstanding colleagues who have distinguished themselves among the community of geneticists by nominating them for the following GSA Awards:
The GSA Journals
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Included in this Issue:
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Education and Professional Development
Educators, we need your help! The deadline for nominations for the 2015 GSA Awards is fast approaching. We welcome your informed suggestions to help us expand the pool of nominees for the Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education, which recognizes significant and sustained impact on genetics education. The award will honor an educator who has promoted greater exposure to and deeper understanding of genetics through achievements such as the following: distinguished teaching or mentoring; development of innovative pedagogical approaches or tools; design of new courses or curricula; national leadership; and/or public engagement and outreach. Nominations are due September 21, 2014. An article in Chronicle of Higher Education's career section provides advice to graduate advisors on how to best support students who wish to pursue non-academic careers. The article also offers suggestions for students on navigating the transition out of academia. Funding, Fellowships, and Awards NIH has awarded more than $64 million to 6 research institutions to create a database of human cellular responses, the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS). This database will catalog cellular and molecular responses to perturbations like drugs and genetic variation.The Emergency Ebola Initiative by the Wellcome Trust and partner funders will support research to swiftly investigate new approaches for treating, preventing and containing the disease during the current epidemic in West Africa. It will also support research into the ethical challenges of testing experimental medicines during epidemics. Please see the call for proposals for further information. The deadline is approaching for the Fulbright-Fogarty fellowships in public health to promote clinical research in resource-limited settings. These fellowships are awarded to medical or graduate students interested in global health, with placements in Asia, Africa, and South America. Applications are due October 14, 2014. The NSF-funded Insect Genetic Technologies Research Coordination Network (IGTRCN) is a 5-year project to enhance the functional genomics capabilities of scientists working on model and non-model insect systems. Network participation is open to all interested scientists, postdocs, students, and technicians. Short-term training fellowships are also available; deadlines are October 1, 2014 and April 1, 2015. Policy The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected its new Assistant Director for Biological Sciences: James L. Olds, a neuroscientist at George Mason University. He is also the Shelley Krasnow University Professor of Molecular Neuroscience, where he led the international Decade of the Mind project that helped to shape President Obama's BRAIN Initiative. Olds has played a central role in scientific public policy development at all levels, ranging from Commonwealth of Virginia and the White House to advising heads of ministries internationally. He will begin his NSF appointment in October 2014.
NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has issued a formal request for information (RFI) to assist the institute in its strategic planning process, which will help guide their programs and priorities over the next five years. NIGMS has developed a draft statement of broad goals and objectives to help guide the process, which includes several themes mentioned in the white paper GSA provided to NIGMS earlier this spring. GSA will offer comments on behalf of the Society. Other individuals and groups are also encouraged to provide feedback before the September 26, 2014 deadline. [more...] The White House is confronting the challenge of reproducibility in science as part of their updates to the Strategy for American Innovation. One of the questions they pose for public comment is: "Given recent evidence of the irreproducibility of a surprising number of published scientific findings, how can the Federal Government leverage its role as a significant funder of scientific research to most effectively address the problem?" asks a notice from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council in the Federal Register. Public input is due September 23, 2014. NPR has featured the current funding crisis for biomedical research in a series of stories. Last week, All Things Considered told the stories of researchers who had left the lab, including one who started a liquor distillery and another who runs a grocery store, and Morning Edition focused on the challenges of maintaining new research facilities that were built during better times. This week, Morning Edition talked about the impact on patients as intense competition has made it harder for scientists to confirm research results and replicate experiments. The National Research Council has released its review of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), the agency's chief competitive grants program. The report concluded that AFRI plays a critical and unique role in the nation's R&D portfolio, but that it has not been given the adequate resources to meet contemporary and (likely) future challenges. Spurring Innovation in Food and Agriculture suggests simplifying the AFRI program structure and rebalancing the portfolio to give top priority to fundamental research with an emphasis on investigator-driven science. [more...] And finally... Recent highlights from the GSA's social networking platforms. Keep up with the buzz by joining us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+:
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| Do you have a brief announcement to submit to GSA e-News? e-News items include news about GSA members — new positions, book publication, awards or grants received and obits; short policy items; brief research news items and grant programs; and, award nomination announcements. Deadline for next issue: September 25, 2014. Send items (and feedback) to GSA's Communications and Engagement Manager, Raeka Aiyar, raiyar@genetics-gsa.org. |
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