Blog

By Peter Yanefski, Communication and Operations Coordinator

This is the first in a series of posts we’re going to share about the research grant process, called Granted. We’ll take you behind the scenes to our process, to show that funding science, isn’t magic.

As part of my role, I assist our Secretariat, Kathy Wisniewski, with Histiocyte Society business. One of the places the Histiocyte Society overlaps with the Association is the scoring of the Histiocytosis Association Research Grant Program.

In our lives, we all have blind spots or biases in one way or another. Even professionally. Some examples are friends we want to be promoted first at work, or a vendor we work with more than others. In the academic and scientific world, these biases, or Conflicts of Interest, are taken very seriously, and need to be disclosed, so bias can stay out any official process, as much as possible.

The same goes for our grant submission process. Each researcher who submits a grant proposal for their research study, also has to submit a conflict-of-interest page, stating where they have conflicts, if any.

There are two main conflicts of interest that need to be disclosed at the outset of the Histiocytosis Research Grant Program. Institutional and relation based.

Side note: In the larger medical field, there is also conflict of interest disclosure for monetary interests, that doesn’t apply here, because those are usually related to pharmaceutical companies or other grant funding entities. In the case of our seed grants, they wouldn’t have reached the stage to have any of this research funded by large agencies like the NIH or pharmaceutical companies. Our grants are usually stepping stones toward getting those types of funding.

Institutional Conflict of Interest

The place where a medical doctor or other research works, can be a conflict of interest. Say Dr. Smith works for the (fictional) Greater Alaska Medical University (GAMU). This means that if anyone in the scoring process is also from GAMU, they cannot be expected to score Dr. Smith’s grant proposal without favoring him. In the scoring process, which we will cover in more depth in a future Granted, Dr. Smith’s colleague will be given a group of grant proposals to score that does not include Dr. Smith’s.

Other institutional conflicts include those medical professionals who are on our Board of Trustees. They are allowed to apply for a grant, and can be awarded one, but they need to recuse themselves from the final decision. And, as with the above example of Dr. Smith, will be given proposals to score that do not contain their own.

Relational Conflicts of Interest

Relational conflicts of interest are basically what you would expect. If I was on the scoring committee, and a relative of mine applied to receive a grant, they would need to disclose that I am their relative, so that the group of grant proposals I score, does not include theirs.

If someone spotted their relative on a grant proposal (say if the relative didn’t know their own relation was on the committee), they could also recuse themselves and not score that proposal.

Next Steps

Next time in our Granted series, we will be covering more of the scoring process, and what goes into it.