Upcoming Conference

2013 CTSI Retreat: Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

A few distinct themes emerged from #CTSI2013 tweets during the two lively panel sessions at the 7th Annual CTSI Retreat:

Themes from the 2nd Panel:
(UCSF Leaders addressed how ‘Big Tent’ proposed initiatives align with/and complement UCSF strategies)
-“Speed Dating” to promote networking among research scientists
-Big Data at UCSF & beyond
-Other ‘Big Tent’ proposal topics

Find below curated tweets by themes.

See Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 1 for visualizations and retreat tweets from ‘Setting the Stage’
& Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2 for tweets during the first panel with industry and academic leaders.

2nd Panel: UCSF Leadership Perspective with Deans from all Five Schools

“Speed Dating” for Scientists – To Drive Novel Translational Research Connections

Big Data at UCSF?

Continue reading →

2013 CTSI Retreat: Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

A few distinct themes emerged from #CTSI2013 tweets during the two lively panel sessions at the 7th Annual CTSI Retreat:

Themes from the 1st Panel:
-Getting out of research and academic silos
-Community & #CitizenScience
-Industry Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Academia
-CTSA Consortium, National Issues

Find below curated tweets by themes.

See Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 1 for visualizations and retreat tweets from ‘Setting the Stage’
& Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3 for tweets during the second panel with UCSF Leadership.

1st Panel: Leveraging CTSI, UCSF and CTSA consortium to radically transform research

Getting out of the Silo

Community & #CitizenScience

Continue reading →

2013 CTSI Retreat: Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 1

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

The 7th Annual CTSI Retreat focused on a selection of 10 open proposals among 23 offered through The Big Tent: CTSI 2016 NIH Renewal Proposal Launchpad.

Attendees and external audiences joined the conversation online via #CTSI2013. A steady flow of tweets came in throughout the day from 27 unique contributors (up from 16 last year) who shared insights, thought-provoking questions and engaged with one another (99,085 impacts!).

See Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2 & Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3 for themes that emerged from #CTSI2013  tweets during the two panel sessions.

Ready & Raring: #CTSI2013 Retreat

2016-2021: Opportunities & Challenges w/ CTSI Director Clay Johnston

Continue onto Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2 & Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3. 

CTSA 2013 Annual Face to Face: The Power of Storytelling

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

Hosted by: University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center (HSC) in cooperation with UNM’s Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC)

This year’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) communications key function committee (CKFC) Annual Face to Face  focused on the critical role of storytelling to lift research of out its silos to a wider audience.

Richard Larson, MD, PhD, UNM HSC Vice Chancellor for Research compared communicators to ambassadors of information – after all, “research ignored is research wasted.”

Purpose/Objectives of the Annual F2F:

  • Increase understanding and support of NCATS and NIH priorities
  • Improve awareness of CTSA value, dissemination of key information, and collaboration among key stakeholders across the consortium
  • Inspire CKFC members through new connections, skill building, clear direction, and storytelling

Here’s a selection of tweets by CTSA communicators during the two-day conference:

Continue reading →

How to run a hack day

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 1 Comment
Science Hack Day San Francisco

Science Hack Day San Francisco 2010

We’re considering running a half-day event for campus developers and webmaster to learn about and tinker with UCSF Profiles’ open APIs and OpenSocial development platform. Whether you call it a hack day, a hackathon, a code-a-thon, or a developer day, the idea’s the same—bringing together technologists to learn, experiment, create, and share.

So how do you run a hack day? Here are some essential hackathon to-dos from my friend Sumana Harihareswara, based on work done for the Wikimedia Foundation:

  • A public wiki page stating the date, time, and venue, and specifying that everyone is welcome. Also tell people what to bring (laptop and power cord), ask them for topic ideas, and ask them to put their names down — no obligation.
  • Outreach/publicity drive, starting at least six weeks in advance, to relevant communities. Ideally you’d get the word out to technical interest groups, local user groups, consultants and other businesses in the industry, individuals whom you want to attend, professors and colleges and universities and technical schools and trainers, email lists, and (if relevant to your audience) newspapers.
  • Some experienced developers. I don’t know the exact ratio, but perhaps a fifth of your participants should be people who have had some experience in developing Wikimedia/MediaWiki stuff, loosely defined. You need some seeds.
  • Documentation tools & some people who will take notes with them (more below).
  • Lightweight tracking. At some point, somehow, at the event, get every participant’s name and email address. That way you can follow up and continue encouraging them after the event.

Because this would be our first time sharing our UCSF Profiles APIs with a wide internal audience, we’ll also need to get our own house in order, to make sure we’re ready to share:

  • Document every API that will be presented, and ensure that it’s comprehensible to our target audience
  • Develop sample “hello world” applications, so our audience can get started quickly, and pull apart working examples
  • Finalize policies around API licensing and data reuse, so developers aren’t left in the lurch if they want to build on our work

Read more:

Health 2.0 code-a-thons in DC, SF

/ Anirvan Chatterjee

Andy Oram writes about his first Health 2.0 code-a-thon, held in Washington, DC. He discusses the setup, and how five teams of biomedical health technologists competed to build a quick and dirty system over the course of a day. The winning project:

“Team Avanade, the quietly intense team whose activity was totally opaque to me, pulled off a stunningly deft feat of programming. They are trying to improve patient compliance by using SMS text messaging to help the patient stay in contact with the physician and remain conscious of his own role in his treatment. A patient registers his cell phone number (or is registered by his doctor) and can then enter relevant information, such as a daily glucose reading, which the tool displays in a graph.”

There will be a Health 2.0 code-a-thon in San Francisco September 24-25. Anyone interested?

Read more:

Upcoming talk on Open Science by Michael Nielsen

/ Peter St.Wecker

For those of us interested in open science, Dr. Michael Nielsen will be speaking in San Francisco later this month.  Dr. Nielsen is a leading advocate in this field and his book, “Reinventing Discovery” will be published later this year.  Here’s some information about his upcoming talk:

The net is transforming many aspects of our society, from finance to friendship.  And yet scientists, who helped create the net, are extremely conservative in how they use it.  Although the net has great potential to transform science, most scientists remain stuck in a centuries-old system for the construction of knowledge. Michael will describe some leading-edge projects that show how online tools can radically change and improve science using projects in Mathematics and Citizen Science as examples, and he will then go on to discuss why these tools haven’t spread to all corners of science, and how we can change that. [via]

The wine, beer, and cheese event will be held at the Public Library of Science on June 29th at 6pm.  The event is free and open to the public,but they ask people to RSVP at rshah@plos.org if you plan to attend.

IRB Approvals…A Need for Speed?

/ Peter St.Wecker / 1 Comment

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) plays a crucial role in the process of approving and overseeing clinical trials.  Unfortunately, the time required for protocol review is often an area of great frustration for all parties involved.  In 2009, the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, Inc. (AAHRPP) surveyed 196 of their client organizations, and found that the average time from protocol submission to approval by the convened IRB was almost 49 days.

While there are many factors that contribute to these long review times, improvements can be made.  Recently, the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine IRB has reported dramatic results:

Last March it took 35 days for a full Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for a clinical trial from the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, which reviews more than 1,000 applications annually. This March, IRB approval time dropped to 21 days, and just 13 days in February.

And those faster approvals were completed with a staff of just three full-time analysts and four coordinators, compared to eight full-time analysts at this time last year.

Reducing the time for investigators to gain IRB approvals required the School of Medicine (SOM) to streamline its business processes, retrain its staff and alter its hiring practices, to be able to do more with less. A key part of this paradigm shift was the development of new procedures and an investigator’s toolkit complete with essential documents, including up to 40 checklists and 30 worksheets that make the submission process more efficient.

Part of Maryland’s new procedures came from working with the Huron Consulting Group, who provide a free set of tools to help IRBs streamline their procedures.  Huron will also be offering a free webinar on May 25th to discuss a model for improving IRB operations.

Turning Science Communication into a Dialogue

/ Katja Reuter / 1 Comment

The Stanford School of Medicine managed to promote science stories broadly without issuing any press releases. At the national CTSA Communications Meeting, John Stafford, New Media Strategist at Stanford, shared some insights how this worked.

Depending on the science story, they posted what’s newsworthy on their blog Scope , Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and – very important – they successfully leveraged the informal relationships with their “blogger friends”. As a result, some of their stories made it into leading science magazines and newspapers.

But the story doesn’t end here: John also demoed a few online monitoring tools to measure media reach and brand leadership. These tools provide dashboards for monitoring how many and what types of media outlets pick up science stories, and even what attitudes readers have towards those stories. Here is a list of tools that might become useful to some of our organizational initiatives:

  • Radian6: Provides a platform to listen, measure and engage with customers across the entire social web.
  • ScoutLabs: A self-serve, web-based tool that includes natural language processing techniques for sentiment and tone scoring. Read article
  • Sysomos Heartbeat: Provides constantly updated snapshots of online conversations.
  • General Sentiment: Media Measurement Dashboard, Reporting Service, and Data API.
  • Jive: Social media monitoring, engagement, and measurement.
  • Klout: Helps you identify people you might want to start a conversation with.
  • Cotweet
  • Tweetreach

For those who still seek more, Stanford will be hosting a social media conference “Medicine 2.0” in September this year.

Internet Summit 2009 – Opportunities and Trends created by Web Innovation

/ Katja Reuter

4 – 5 November 2009, Raleigh, North Carolina

The event will “showcase and promote forward thinking and thought leadership on topics related to the Internet economy and web oriented technologies”. The agenda includes: social media, online advertising strategies, blogging, Twitter & Real Time, search, video, email marketing, cloud, analytics, design and usability. View all agenda topics.

Speakers /  More information