University Research Council

February 16, 2011

Meeting Summary

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Multidisciplinary Grant Project

Kevin Ashley, Professor in the School of Law, reported on the status of his multidisciplinary grant, which is entitled Automating Comparative Analysis of Public Health Statutory Frameworks. He is working with Patricia Sweeney, Assistant Professor in the Graduate School Public Health; Rebecca Hwa, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science; and Matthias Grabmair, a graduate student researcher in the Intelligent Systems Program. They are comparing how states’ laws governing agents in the public health system either facilitate or frustrate each system’s ability to plan for and respond to public health emergencies. The project has two goals, to determine:

• Whether a computer program, trained on manually-coded examples, can automatically encode statutes for purposes of comparisons in this public health domain;
• What can one learn from a comparison of the laws of different states with respect to health system emergency preparedness and response.

The principal investigators will focus initially upon Pennsylvania. They will later attempt to replicate their results with a study of statutory law in California.

Report from the Office of Research

George Klinzing discussed several aspects of the Office of Research’s operations:

• The Office currently is working with several departments to test InfoEd’s proposal development module. This module will help investigators route a proposal electronically and permit them to submit the proposal electronically to the sponsoring agency.

• The Office of Research will periodically sponsor an open forum entitled “Ask the Office of Research.” The next forum will be held February 22.
• InfoEd hopes to provide the material transfer agreement (MTA) portal to the University soon. It will be rolled out a couple months after it is received.
• The Office is installing an in-house training room, which will enable its staff to train research administrators in various procedures.

Multidisciplinary Projects

The Provost’s Office continues to explore three multidisciplinary topics: how to apply immunology models to cybersecurity, how to minimize the complexity of manufacturing models, and how to use social networks to enhance problem solving. Teams have met regularly to work on the projects. Each team now will prepare a white paper as a plan for future research.

Miscellaneous

Council members also discussed:

• The Washington, D.C., federal agency trip
• Cuts in the NSF and NIH budgets
• The Central Research Development Fund