This proposal requests funds to continue enhancement of the human subject protection process at a large, diverse non-medical school university campus and to expand these developments to two neighboring public universities with similar human subject research activities. The University of Maryland College Park will continue development of software and educational tools begun during the first year of NIH support and will now share these developments with our collaborating institutions and, through our collaborations, initiate new and creative procedures for enhancing human subjects protection. Funds will be used to improve education and outreach within each Campus community, implement a continuous education procedure for all personnel involved in any aspect of human subjects research from IRB faculty and staff members to graduate and undergraduate student investigators, increase IRB quality by participating and hosting workshops on IRB best practices, increase IRB efficiency and discipline by organizing and clarifying the SOPs of each institution's IRB, institute an annual shared, cross-institution review of IRB processes, and facilitate certain aspects of the review process and its integration into sponsored research proposal tracking.
