FA 5 Progress Report WV-INBRE - Joan C. Edwards School of ...

Program Director/Principal Investigator (Last, First, Middle): Rankin, Gary O 10meeting and (ii) the members of the AC assess the progress made by the funded INBRE investigators bycontacting both the individual investigators and their mentors (during Fall) and presnt their findings at theannual Evaluation meeting held each fall. At the end of the evaluation meeting, assessment reports are sentto the PUI investigators and their respective mentors.Additionally, members of the AC periodically visit some of the network institutes, to assess progress ininfrastructure made in these funded institutions. During the Fall Evaluation retreats the AC also evaluatesthe progress made by each of the WV-INBRE funded cores, i.e. bio-informatics core, genomics core andimaging core.External Evaluation:In phase 2 of the funding cycle, in addition to the internal evaluations, the Evaluation Core also conductedthe external evaluation. The first external evaluation meeting was conducted in March of 2010.AAAS Evaluation meeting: In March of 2010, AAAS helped evaluate the WV-INBRE Bio-informatics andgenomics cores. The AAAS provided a 26 page evaluation report on their findings and recommendations.Several of the recommendations have been included as part of the services provided by the two cores in thesubsequent years.SUBPROJECT PROGRESSReports from the Internal Program Evaluation Meeting held November 2011:Surveys were sent out to nine network institutions that are part of the WV-INBRE network. Fromeach institute, one lead investigator and one institutional official were identified to complete thesurveys. Completed surveys were received from seven institutes. The data obtained from thesurveys indicated that, this past year there were twelve papers published, one published abstractand twenty five presentations at national and regional meetings by network investigators. A total of$9,333,299 of extramural funding was obtained this past year by the various network institutes.Funding sources included NSF and NASA-EPSCOR. Several of the network institutions have eitherprovided matching funds for research or provided improved infrastructure for WV-INBREinvestigators. There has been an increase in research partnerships between the two lead institutionsand network institutions but not within the WV-INBRE network investigators, which needs to beaddressed. Such partnership will strengthen the research base in West Virginia. The summerinternship program continues to draw the best students from the network. This past year funds werealso available for 3 HSTA high-school teachers to have summer research experience. This year 75students had applied for this program which is an increase from previous years and36 interns were selected. At the summer research symposium that was held on July 28th 2011 atMarshall University campus, 56 posters and 6 oral presentations were made by both INBREinvestigators, HSTA high-school teacher and INBRE supported students.Online Resources in progress: With the assistance from the information technology expert, Mr.Brian Patton and the Biostatistician Dr. James Denvir, we have started establishing a studentdatabase that will list all the students who have been associated with WV-INBRE since itsinception. This database will help in tracking the progress made by WV-INBRE associated studentsover the years.We are also in plans of setting up online evaluation surveys accessible to all WV-INBRE fundedinvestigators. We anticipate that user-friendly online surveys will help improve responses from theinvestigators and help gather complete data.External Evaluation March-April 2012: WV-INBRE is planning on conducting the second externalevaluation meeting the spring of 2012. The evaluation core is currently in the process of planningfor this meeting. With the recommendation from the AC, the topic to be evaluated this year is “ThePHS 2590 (Rev. 06/09)Continuation Format Page