I think we'll go ahead and get started like the, like the popcorn in the microwave, the pings of people joining us has slowed to a cadence that makes sense for us to get going. So good morning everyone. Charlie Reardon, Vice President for Research at the University of Delaware. Pleasure to welcome you in this capacity, I have the pleasure of serving as the chair of the search committee for the new director new PI of the Delaware in BRI program. So before I introduce today's candidate John Jacob, Let me just spend a couple of minutes of orienting all of you to the delaware idea program and the role of the principal investigators. So as many of you know, the Embry program, which stands for the bead idea network of Biomedical Research Excellence, is a five-year federal award from the NIH with the significant state match. That aims to expand research activities across basic translational and clinical areas throughout the first state, while also increasing Delaware is competitiveness for federal biomedical research funding has been a very successful program for nearly 20 years now. The Embry, the Delaware Embry as a collaborative network of Delaware academic health care and research institutions, consisting presently have five partner institutions, the University of Delaware, delaware State University, Christiana Care Health System though our Technical and Community College and tumours Alfred I. Dupont hospital for children, along with nine other affiliated partners. In identifying the next principal investigator of the Delaware Embry. The network seeks to appoint individual with an established record of research excellence, strong faculty and staff mentoring skills, an unwavering commitment to inclusive excellence and social justice. The ability to build community and collaborations between disparate groups and institutions, and administrative vacuum it. So we've set clearly a very high bar for the next BI. It's my pleasure to serve as a member, as I indicated of the search committee for the next PI, along with Hassan Bacardi from Delaware State University, John McDowell, Delaware Tech Community College, to regrow a month from tumours. Scott Siegel from Christiana Care and Kathy Wu, also from Udi. We've identified two outstanding and talented biomedical research scholars and administrators as candidates for the role. So the format for today's session similar to Mondays. So the candidate, Professor John Jacob will present his vision for the future of Delaware Embry, occupying about the first 20 minutes or so of the time we have together. And then the balance of the hours open for questions for all participating online. I'd asked you at this time to ensure that you're on mute as we continue through the presentation. So for submitting questions, please submit those via the chat function on Zoom. I'll cure rate the questions and following the candidates presentation, ask questions of Professor Jacob. Our approach will be to allow each person to ask a single question, perhaps a follow up, and then we can loop back around as others have a chance to ask first questions. The search committee has also established a survey to solicit your input. I'll put the link to that survey in the chat at an email will go out after today's presentation. So it's my pleasure to introduce today's candidate John Jacob. Professor Jake us, both Professor and Department Chair in kinesiology and applied physiology here at the University of Delaware. Professor Jake a joint Udi and 2017 coming from Temple University where he was also professor and department chair of their program and in kinesiology. Prior to temple, he spent nearly 20 years on the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park. Professor Jake has published more than a 100 peer-reviewed papers, supervised nearly 20 doctoral students through two degree attainment and provides undergraduate research experiences for three to five students each year and also includes high-school students. In his research program has a long track record of successful NIH funding through R1, R 29 and our 21 mechanisms, as well as multiple words from the NSF and other sponsors. Professor Jake a. Currently served on a number of boards, including the editorial board of the Journal gait and posture, Journal of motor behavior and the National Science Foundation College or reviewers. Dr. Jacob is a fellow of the National Academy of Kinesiology and in 2014 received the Charles Smith College of Science Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Florida Atlantic University. So with that, John, happy to turn it over to you. Thanks so much for your interest in the program and we look forward to your presentation. Thank you, Charlie. Let me start my screen. Share. Can everyone see that? Okay. So thank you for having me here today. I'm really honored to apply for this position. It's a it's a wonderful opportunity at this point in my career. One of the things I really love about science is that it values people's trajectory throughout their careers. It reminds me of a, of a, of an article I read some years ago about a person who was one of the original employees of Airbnb and being one of the original employees, he was a very wealthy man. And he bought some and I'll resort property down in Mexico and turned it into a conference center. And one of the first conferences he held was late career development in the tech industry. And he noted in the article that many of the attendees were in their 30s. So I hope, I hope my experience is such that you think it's a valuable contribution to Delaware induce future. Where you've seen how here's a picture of my lab, the virtual reality cave, which I'll go into more detail in a moment. So my research agenda has, has been over the last 25, 30 years, the neural control balanced and standing and walking. I've had some success there. Over those 30 years. I've had over $25 million grant funding from NIH, NSF, and various private foundations had number of publications. And along the way I've, I've taught around 50 courses or so. So I, I've had experience at all levels of the academic world. On the side, I also wanted to emphasize that I, I do have practical applications to my research as well. I actually, I'm a sole proprietor of a company called tread sense treads. Emphasizing the fact that my research really focuses on sensory contributions to, to mobility and controlled standing imbalance, meaning vision, the inner ear, and proprioceptive inputs. I participate in the NSF I core program and received an award to develop technology. I have three patents to wearable devices and a mobile app. And currently I'm also spending time as a as an expert witness. I'm currently involved in for legal cases that are involved in mobility and balance issues. So I've really tried throughout my career not only to pursue academic research, basic science research, but actually made a point of trying to apply my research to real life problems. Okay, Let's dance there. So in the last 10 or so years, I've also taken on leadership and administrative responsibilities. When I was at University of Maryland, I was an associate director of the neural and cognitive science graduate program, which consisted of 12 departments, 30 lab groups, 50 plus students. Very successful program that started in the mid-nineties. From there, I moved on to Temple University where we took on serious administrative role as chair of the department with a, with a healthy department with over 600 undergraduates and so forth. And then I moved to University of Delaware as chair in 2017. I still consider myself a little bit of a newbie when it comes to University of Delaware. Since many people have been here much longer than I. So I'm still learning about the university. But in that time, I've, I've, we've grown as a department. We recently achieved or national ranking of number five in the National Academy. It's really an excellent department that has an active research labs, large undergraduate program, as well as a very successful graduate program, all supported by sudden staff. So it's a, it's a, it's a big job, but it's a fun job. And I really enjoy being being part of this, this department. In the last couple of years, I've also developed a been part of that development and lead the development of the new interdiscipline neuroscience graduate program here at University of Delaware. Along with my executive team from, which consisted of people from all around the university, we developed a program that really was, I felt when I came to University of Delaware. I'm missing a gap in the university's educational agenda. I mean, there was all sorts of great neuroscience going on, on campus. And I felt like there was no mechanism for people to actually share their research and talk to each other. So a number of us decided two years ago to start this program. We submitted a proposal this last spring and it was accepted. And now we have a program. And I'm the program director. We have eight students who have entered the program this fall, which are all transfer students from within the university. And we seek to develop to develop that program and start attracting students from the outside as well. Very successful endeavor. And I'm really happy to be leading that, that endeavor. This is a picture of my lab. This is the virtual reality cave. And when it's not really operational, what I want to emphasize here is that this is a typical size in my lab. In this particular picture, the three postdocs, five graduate students and undergraduate students. So I really have always prided myself at keeping all, all levels of educational levels in my lab. And there's this, It's also consists of physical therapists. Mathematicians, kinesiologist, engineers have always been a part of my lap. So it's been a very, very cross disciplinary endeavor when we actually have work done on problems involving standing, standing, and walking. This is a video that was developed some years ago. Just to show you this when they're Lab was first being built in 2017 when I arrived at Delaware. Just to give you an idea of how it operates, It's really a wonderful tool that allows us to really control the sensory environment that people have walked. I'm very fancy. Treadmill that measures the forces that you apply is called a self. That's me, as well as other sensory. So we can really play with your sensory system and understand how and why. These are some of the problems that i've, I've actually addressed over my career. Bounced control during standing and balance control during walking. To the, to the main problems. Along the way, we've addressed neurological populations like children with cerebral palsy, older adults, just aging alone, but also people with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease. And concussion is a more recent one that we've addressed. All of these all these neurological problems often end up with balanced problems and mobility problems, which is common to two, too many, many of them across. So there they all have their own set of issues regarding that. And we've also developed computational models of balanced control and again, applied technology. So it's been a very, very fruitful research career. It's not over yet. I still have an active research lab and I just want to share with you, I never considered science to be a job or a career. I always consider it to be a privilege. The fact that you can you can decide something that's interesting to you, go after it. And there are resources there support. That is, I consider one of the great privileges of living in this country and in any country that supports science. It's never, it's never been a job for me. I've always been excited to be a part of that endeavor. I've also actually been an editor, editor of gait and posture and journals more behavior as, as Charlie mentioned. Along the way, I've had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with many people. One of the reasons I came to University of Delaware in 2017 was that I had collaborators ready, ready and waiting. It's such a rich atmosphere at the star Center for, for collaboration. And so I immediately had collaboration setup along with many national collaborators and international collaborators that I have developed over the years. That is also one of the joys I think, of science, that you get to collaborate with people all over the world on these problems are common across nations. So it's just been a wonderful experience. And just to give you one simple example of some of the technology we've developed. This device called ARM sense. That was a PhD project of a student of mine who's now actually working in the Department of Physical Therapy as a post-doc with Darcy reason, brilliant student in which we develop this device, which is a cuing device that's like a wristband as people walk. This is specifically designed for Parkinson's disease because people have these very limited movements when they walk with Parkinson's. But the interesting thing is that when they can move bigger, if they're stimulated to, usually by a physical therapist. We've replaced the physical therapist with a wristband that buzzes as you as you extend your arm up to a certain level. So you have to, it's an internal motivation to move your arms more. When you do that, on all aspects of your gait get better, you use, your speed improves your balance, improves, everything improves. And so it was a very interesting endeavor for me to develop this product. It's now in the hands of a company in Ohio, developed for the outside. But it's a wonderful project and I really enjoyed being part of that. Okay. So that's in a nutshell, is a very brief overview of what I've done research wise, but I wanted to get into how I feel I can contribute to to Embry. You know, one of the things, again, I'm I'm an outsider. I haven't been involved in Embry in the past in any real way. And so I've had to garner a lot of information by talking to people, going through websites, going to information that's available to the public. And it's been a very interesting investigation for me. And one thing that I think is really important to emphasize is that didn Delaware Embry has to be more than just a source of funding for the stakeholders. The question that really comes to mind for me is. Is it also serving to develop a culture of biomedical research? And I'm sure that it is. The question is whether that culture is something that can be developed further. And culture to me is very important as the chair, I've always emphasized that in with my faculty and students that, you know, the important aspects of running a larger organization is to develop a culture that's self-sustaining and feeds off of itself in positive ways. So one of my first thoughts about DOT or Embry is, this is a very, this is a very multi-faceted and very well run the organization. So first thing is do no harm. Make sure you don't mess it up because it is running very well. At the same time you have to ask yourself, how can it be improved? No organization is perfect. So how can we make it even better? So what type of leadership because NB currently need? Well, it's certainly a very well-established program since the early 2000s, very healthy. It's gone through multiple cycles of funding successfully. And i've, I've been told that it actually often gets one of the highest scores of any idea program. So it's actually been, been very successful at maintaining its stature within the idea programs. And most recently, my understanding is that Steve stand hope as the, as the current PI has instituted a decentralized organization. And I really applaud Steve for doing that, for not only running a great program, but for making steps to decentralize. Because that's the sign of a mature program. That's the sign that doesn't need a lot of top-down control that you're delegating responsibility to those at peripherally. And you're letting people make autonomous decisions. And that's, that's to me, a signature of a program that's already got a very well-grounded foundation. So hats off to Steve for doing that and and make making sure that the program successfully mature as it should. But I think the key to a leadership position in the program or an organization like this, is what's referred to as situational leadership. And what that means is that you can't be just one kind of leader. You have to really adapt to whatever aspect of the organization you're dealing with at that time. So for example, we all went through a huge transition when the pandemic hit us in March 2020. And we're saying, okay, go home tomorrow and develop your online, develop online courses for delivery online students next week. Which was a great challenge, I'm sure for many faculty. And within our department, we had a mixture of faculty. Many of our faculty are very research-based and have extensive research programs. But we also have developed a core teaching team. Because one of the things we do is we teach anatomy and physiology, just as huge course that's taken by students all across the university. And that core teaching team is really dedicated to delivering content, but also delivering contact and creative ways. And so they are very on top of online course delivery. They often had hybrid courses or hybrid delivery. So they knew all the tricks and all the, all the latest features of doing such things. At the same time, many of our research faculty were more research focused and didn't have time to stay up with those things. So we developed a I develop a online resource team. And the deal was, there were three or four faculty who we knew understood everything about online delivery. And I said to any faculty, if you run into trouble or any hitches and developing your courses online, do not waste your time going to Google and searching for an answer or going to a manual and look into that menu. Go to our online teaching team. And they will give you an answer far quicker than you can fight yourself. And I had a couple of faculty come up. You can say, you know, I contacted the team, I had a problem. They answered it within minutes and it saved me so much time and making that transition. So that's the sort of thing as a leader in an organization like this with so many facets that you have to be ready to not only delegate responsibility, but, but direct that responsibility in the correct with a and support people in such a way that it really makes their lives more efficient and their, and their progress towards whatever tests they're involved in. So one of the first things I have to do if I was to become PI of of Embry is go on a listening tour. As I said, I'm still relatively new to Delaware compared to UD, compared to many people on campus. I've been here five years, enjoyed it thoroughly. But beyond that, in the broader Delaware contexts that embrace involved in, I have I haven't had much interactions. I've had some interaction with people in the Moors and Christiana. And at DSU, I hadn't had many interactions with people at Dell tech. And I look forward to that because I think community colleges, which, which are support half the undergraduates in our country, it's an important aspect of the education. Education agenda of our country. So I'm going to go on a listening tour and I'm going to meet with all the stations, stakeholders and talk to them and ask them questions like what are the challenges specific to your institution in terms of its involvement in BRI is doing for you and how you're involved within brain. And also how are you personally engaged and the dough and bring network. And that goes for not only when I consider stakeholders, I'm talking about not just faculty and directors and people involved in a clinical coordination, but students as well, meeting with student groups to actually ask them, how is Embry wasn't done for you? How can we do better? And that's a big job that will take some time to actually meet with everyone and, and get their impressions of how Henry abuse working for them. But it's an important step. So when I looked at in BRI, I really asked myself, it's a very complicated organization, multifaceted. And to again, his credit, Steve has done a great job and developing it. But I asked myself, what's the simplest way to conceive of memory? And when I thought of that, the simplest way was to consider these four elements, students, faculty, partner institutions, and the broader Delaware biotech network. If you actually ask yourself how hungry serving each of these elements, you're pretty much hitting all the, all the pieces of what embryos about. So for example, some of the things that are really important in the NB program or the, or the early onset student experiences that undergraduates get these Emperor course is that actually in, in our innovative in terms of inserting and research into the agenda, the teaching course is critically important for students who might be coming to a community college and have no, no research experience whatsoever. Or in the Summer Scholars Program, which is important for students get experience in labs not only in their own university, but possibly cross institution. And by the way, M cure courses are considered one of the best ways to attract under-represented minorities into science. And because they're, these are often given it at community colleges and primarily undergraduate institutions that actually have a larger, larger, and minority population than the larger universities can have. And it's a way to get them interested early. I've always said to undergraduates who come to my lab in my office. If you come to a university and you do not have a taste of what research is about, you've made, you've, you've missed an opportunity. And the important thing about research I think, is you have to certainly be smart to do research. That's, that's all well and good. But really it's about personality. And my, is my personality well suited to the research process? And that is something you can only discover by, by digging in and trying them. So it's really important to, to hit these students early on to see if their personality and their interest level is something that's suitable for a stem career. At the graduate level. There has been the most latest phase of imagery. There was funding given for graduate students at PSU. That's something that we'll continue to explore and see if that should be expanded to provide more opportunities for funding graduate research. But I want to also emphasize that I think one of the important things that embrace can serve is writing workshops. Know, I've, I've said on many, many study sections, and I've read many, many grants and reviewed many, many, many grants. And it's up for all of you who have done that as well. You know, what a pleasure it is to get a well-written grant. You know, you're you're assigned 12 grants. They take at least a day to read and review thoroughly. It's a lot of work to do that. And when you have a grant where we know the person's right, Nick Brett is very smart and doing very good science, but just has not written a compelling story. It just comes off the tragedy. And when someone writes a very good brand, it just comes off as a wonderful experience to read. And that is often what separates the ones that are funded from ones that are not. One of my, to my graduate students right now are taking a course from Don Elliott and Biomedical Engineering, who's teaching a course in part of the course, some brands, mint chip. And there's a large writing component that course. And they come up to me in the last couple weeks, it just started in the early fall. They poke and said, Oh my God, I can't write. I just I just realized, I don't know how to write. And it's a tribute to Dawn, who's actually developing this skill and graduate students and showing them what really means to right, right, well, from a technical and scientific perspective. So I think writing is so critical and it really is something that separates people. One of the problems with dissection says that there's so many good brands and they're always telling the reviewers, you gotta push the scores. You got to spread the scores, spread of scores, and you get all these great brands. And it's very hard sometimes. But what distinguishes one big brands from another is the writing. And so I think that's something I really want to emphasize as part of a training component of Embry. Terms of faculty, I know that Embry is very supportive in many of the things. I'm not going to touch on all the aspects of it because I know many of these things are are are well-developed and I'm not going to, I think it's it's it's a great program in terms of training. And I'm just citing things I think it should be emphasized. So in terms of junior faculty career development, there's an article that appeared in nature, but training get gaps, junior PIs. And the question was asked to do a training. People. Number one, that turned out to be the number one issue for many junior PIs. We know you come out as a postdoc and you've just so focused on your science and research and writing papers and so forth. And then suddenly you become a faculty member. Now you have to manage people. Well. Not everyone. Not everyone is, has natural talents at that. Some do, but some don't. And the training of PI as a junior PIs and how to manage a lab is important. And I think it's an aspect we could emphasize. Writing workshops again, for junior PIs, we all could be better writers no matter what, what level of where we're at. And for junior PIs, particularly, it's critical as they start started submitting grants to have these writing skills in place. And I know that that has these pilot program proposals that are funded for junior PIs and that's great and that gives them the right an experience and feedback and so forth. But I think even beyond that, when a junior investigator is is ready submit and R1, I think we should have granted do teams in place before they actually submit the grant, NIH, NSF or whatever. You know, there's there there can be eyes that are outside your profession that are, that are able to comment on things not about your science, but about your clarity, your logic, development of the idea, the compelling nature of the grant that are that are critical for, for getting funded. So I don't think a pilot it should embrace should just give out. Both of them think their job is done. I think we have to continue that development and support junior faculty as they're getting ready, submit their R1. So partner institutions is another important element of corpus of injury. And you know, That's one of the real strengths of, of, of the NB program to have these, these great partner institutions. This is more about the culture, you know, about the, you don't want a partner institution just view embryo has a pot of money. You don't want them just to view it as something that can help you locally. You want to view that the partner Institute view that's part of the network event rate. And so you want to strengthen these cross institution opportunities. So Summer Scholars it not only at your own institution but at another institution where you might go to someone else's lab who might be at another institution, student travel grants to attend conferences. That is one of the my, my strongest memories. As a student, a graduate student. I attended. My first conference was the Society for Neuroscience Annual Conference, which is a huge conference, 30 thousand people international, all people come from all over the world to this conference. And I remember just being awed by what I was a part of and motivated two to the nth degree. I was, I was so excited to be a part of this enterprise that was so much bigger than just me or my lab, but part of a cadre of people that were just coming from all over the world to talk about these issues. It was such a motivating factor. And I'll share with you that since the pandemic has started, I've had, I've had a couple of graduate students who really sort of finishing their first year just as the pandemic started. And so they're just about ready to maybe start considered going to a conference and now it's been shut down of course, except virtually which is not the same experience. And they've they've shared with me that they have trouble feeling. What's the what's the, the larger agenda of the field. They were certainly read papers in my lab. We talk about things. But there's nothing like going to a conference to see what's out there. And they, they, they're feeling that's one of the great, I think, difficulties that students are experiencing during this pandemics, that they're not getting that experience of going to a conference and being able to talk to a famous person in their field at their poster right in front of them. I mean, that was, I remember that being so thrilled by that. So I think we have to show students that there's this. It's not just about being a lab that's about point out there and exploring ideas and seeing how these ideas are being, are being explored by, by people all over the world. That is so, so thrilling as a student. I think we have, we do have internship experience. Our clinical partners and I, but I think we want to emphasize that and continue that because some students are really more interested in the applications of less of the basic science. But really how does this apply to the medical field and human health? And I think those clinical partners are incredibly important for the NB program. And making sure that those cross institutional links are emphasized. And of course, what's already in places, the idea symposium that actually brings everyone together to actually talk about what has been done in Britain. I think that's pretty cool. One, One interesting, maybe new idea that we could implement is what I call research culture cafe. You know, it's, it's, I view this as sort of an informal get-together of, of people involved an injury to talk about any issue they really want to scientifically or, or by training, so forth. And I'll tell you my experience was I was part of a journal club some years ago where we had this cross department journal club from engineering and, and kinesiology and biology and so forth. And one of the rules of the journal club was no PowerPoints. So people had to get up in front of a whiteboard with a marker and just explain to us their research. And I'll tell you, it was one of the best journal clubs I've never been part of. It was so discussion-based people were. We're much more prone to interrupt the speaker with questions like, I don't understand that I can explain this a bit more. It was almost like a audience based lead talk for the speaker to handle. And of course, some speakers were better at that than others. But it was just such an exciting venue because it was so informal and it really got to the guts of many issues where once you put the PowerPoint up and suddenly you're into the structure that maybe harder to, to dive into from the audience. So I would like to consider this as a possibility for Embry to have these regular meetings which we call a sort of a research culture Cafe. So the other thing is the Delaware biotech. And this one I, I must say, was the hardest one for me to decipher. Certainly the core facilities as important aspect of, of of injury and and we have there are a whole list of core facilities. I would I would want to go to those four core facilities and ask. So Howard, how they serve in the network, how many people from India will using them and so forth. And also our facilities are needed. I know there's talk. The CBI at at University of Delaware is already at capacity and there's talk about another MRI and so forth. That's certainly something we want to be involved in. So these core facilities are important, but I'd have to actually be on my agenda to actually go to the core facilities, talk to them and get a sense of how they've been used successfully. And the last piece is the probably the hardest one for me decipher, as I mentioned, is these private partnership with DOT or bio and GHI on and so forth. It's it's certainly their their partners within Bree. I won. I would want to explore how extensively those partnerships and how deeply they go. I think it's a, it's a great opportunity. One of my graduate students who recently got his PhD about two years ago. And I'm working for the company that is developing my onsets device and he's now a senior engineer at that company. So developing those. The time there was no he had no when he was getting his PhD, he wasn't thinking in that direction. But suddenly as, as he was finishing his PhD, that became an opportunity and he jumped on it. These having it's working out beautifully for it. So developing those private industry contexts is something that's critically important for, for a program like this. And I would need again to go to the stakeholders at each of these, these private entities and, and talk about how it can be really embedded. It is already, how can we further embedded in the network? So that's about it. I just want to show you a last, last slide, which I always find it motivating slide. Oh, sorry, one more. One more is that the delivery and renewal is upon us. And I know they're ideas that have been shared BY, by transforming the DRP into a core, reviewing our graduate funding opportunities and strengthen our partnerships with woman to be a woman to university and so forth. I also want to explore a minute. This is a big administrative programs, so I want to explore administrative efficiencies. And a long-range discussion is whether there are future course that needed to be developed as part of the program. So with that, I end with my one of my favorite videos to show how one can take one of the Muslim Jain test possible and turn it into a creative effort. So that's something that always motivates me in whatever endeavor I took on. Thank you very much. Great, Thanks very much, John. I'm reminding on the call to enter your questions through the chat function on Zoom. We've done about 20 minutes or so for, for Q and a. We'll get right into that Jonathan showcase. The first question comes from Don Elliott asking When you mentioned near the end of your presentation, when you see Embry, we know and how would you position the team for success and what are your new ideas for the renewal proposal? Well, that was that was my last slide address that certain that proposal. I think it's doing a year and a half. And so that gives me some time to really dig into and Bree and understand it more substantively. But certainly one of the things I've discussed with with Steve stand hope along the way so you don't want to change too much. You don't want to. This is a very well run program and I was like I was emphasizing some of my slides do no harm. Because it's always been, it's got a great track record. So it's a program that I'd say needs to be tweaked but not changed dramatically. I think we've got a great staff I've had some discussions with Don't ever heart or the last few months, and I think she's extremely knowledgeable and competent about the program. And I look for her leadership I made on the, on the staff. But I think there's some, some things that are obvious. We lost. Wesley College has a partner has closes university. Those funds now can be allocated elsewhere. That's something that we're going to, we're going to talk about and brain Wilmington, VA and Wilmington University into the program Morse, It's an affiliate partner now, but I think bringing in as an actual partner would be relevant. Agenda item for the renewal. So I think there's there's not a lot changed, but there are things to add that I think could be important. Great. I'm going to go a little bit out of order. So if you've asked a question, don't worry, I will get to yours but I'm going to jump over to a question from Suzanne Melbourne because it touches on the Wilmington Leanna use mentioned John. So question is how would you envision the Delaware Embry partnering with Wilmington Ba to grow biomedical research workforce dedicated to improving better and health outcomes and Embry focus areas of which are currently cardiovascular, neuroscience and cancer, et cetera. So maybe some a little bit deeper level of, of your thoughts, particularly given your own experiences as to how we can engage that community? Yeah. I've been to the Wilmington, VA once. I actually give a talk there some years ago because we were talking about some potential collaboration with faculty within cap. It's I think it's the VA is interesting institution that has lots of challenges. As I was going through the hospital and seeing a lot of veterans been treated. And I talked to the director there. He said There's a huge component of of, of health care that has been unrecognized here from a research perspective. Obviously, you've got neurological issues involving veterans who've got all the health health problems that veterans are encountering. And what I don't know enough about is the administration of the VA. That is something I'd have to actually meet with them and talk to them about how much they want to be involved with within break. I know there was a case with Wilmington University where they were offered some funding for an end to your course and the last phase, and they decided they were not set up to accept those funds. So you have to make sure that they're ready as an institution to partner and see what, what sort of synergies we can create with them. So that would be a stakeholder that I will actually be, be on the top of my list to actually approach over the next month or two and and discuss with them how they would be involved. That's great. And I would add, as you may know, Suzanne Melbourne would be a great resource for that collaboration in those conversations. So next question is from Dan M. And who's one of our colleagues at Delaware Technical Community College, the DNS. Beyond receiving multiple years of funding and packaging Delaware Embry, as a well established program for two decades. Can you identify one or two primary examples from the past of how Embry has been extraordinarily successful in achieving its mission. So certainly there's a track record. If you look at the progress report from last year, which I did, I mean the number of of of investigators supported across Delaware, the number of publications that are associated within the program, the amount of money that's been given to support these is huge. I think the number was close to a 1000 investigators were were involved in the NB program in one way or another. I mean, that's that's very impactful. But I think also the sort of funny, I mentioned the EMT, your courses. A lot of those went to Dell tech to develop research-based courses that they'll tack and funding was provided to develop those. I think that's a very important aspect of injury to go after and, and be supportive of community college students. Because they are ones that are probably the least exposed to the research in Delaware and to and to actually support their, their efforts to actually expose those students research I consider to be a wonderful success story. So, you know, the, the, the NP program, as I went through it more and more and more, I realize this is, this is really a story that has nothing but good news attached to it. Now what I can't see from the outside is that there are, no program is perfect and there are probably some things that are working better than others and that I don't know yet and that's what I want to know. Let's get into it. I want to see where things working really well and where things working less well. And that's something that I think you've got embedded in the budget and so forth and seeing what sort of things come out of it to really discern. But so far, so good. Great, Thanks. Next, Next question comes from Joe Fox, who many know Joe is the idea of PI. So Joe's the PI on a face to Cobra here at the University of Delaware. And so Joe asks, UT doesn't currently have a Sepah and tumours and Christiana care have much room for new cope refunding. Cuz you discuss how the Embry can help maximize the number of idea grants, the cobras and CPS across the state. And how will this differ among the different institutions in the state? Well, that's a that's a that's a tough question. I'll give you credit for that one, Joe. So one of the things that I've heard along the way is that this is really designed to be a support. And many the idea states it's primarily supporting undergraduate institutions and community colleges. And the fact that new D as a research one university is the lead some people to express some concern about. So I think the important thing is that when we are exploring opportunities to develop, opportunity, to develop opportunities. Again, it's these cross institutional opportunities that I want to emphasize. And so I think that is only going to strengthen our proposal to make sure you're involving institutions throughout the Delaware in real network. And that's my that's my primary question when I started my vision. Is it developing just a local funding channel for each, each partner? Or is it really developing a network of biomedical research? And that's the culture issue. And so I, I am very supportive of making sure that these cross institutional links are developed because I think that leads to stronger proposals and it feeds the network. So that's my plan. Now. I think I would add that I think the Embry program and they, Embry PI in particular are uniquely situated because of the, the network to really understand better than most idea PIs. That the differences in value, the differences between the institutions in terms of what their missions are, their priorities are, and how to optimize success across the various mechanisms. So I think the, the, the, the Embry PI can be first among peers if you will, and bringing those idea PIs together. Traditionally, some of the other mechanisms oh, no, required have, have tended to be based focused on a single institution. Certainly the co-vary in neuroscience that the Melissa Harrington PIs, a Delaware State is an exception because of the deep relationship between Dell state and UD in that program. But I think part of this question is, are there opportunities to, to build those networks and other ways beyond the, the Embry? And then the challenge is how do you, how do you work those relationship? It's hard enough to, to navigate our own bureaucracy on a single campus and is try to figure out your way. So I think there's some great opportunity. I think that's the great challenge of indegree. That's the great challenge. How do you develop a true cross institutional network that supports biomedical research? That is the great challenge. So there's no single answer to that. And I think that's something that requires some real investigating and listening to all be critical for that. Yeah. So I'm seeing no other questions I'll take. I'll encourage folks to add questions to the chat and in the meantime, I'll take the, the privilege of asking a question my own is going back John it in the introduction when I've talked a little bit about some of the expectations for the, for the new PI. And you certainly touched on, on diversity and underserved populations. But maybe you could say a little bit more about. Perhaps in an example from your prior work as a, as a department chair, program director, where you feel like your work and attention towards culture as your reference, the public context really helped advance and support a more inclusive environment in a department and a program, whether it be among students, faculty, staff. Yeah. So as a department chair, I instituted the motivation and what we end up doing as a department almost two years ago, actually created our own diversity and inclusion committee within our within our department. And one of the one of the things we talked about this we had we spent a number of meetings discussing what's the best way to approach this. And one of the failures I think of diversity inclusion is it turns into a numbers game. Know where you start saying, Oh, we have this many minority students mistake. But again, that doesn't really hit, hit it. You want to develop a culture where under-represented minorities feel welcome in that culture and we know the stem fields. I have a real problem there. It's very, there's still a lot to be done. So I think that when you go to, when you go to these training modules and so forth about diversity inclusion, that's all well and good, but you really need mechanisms. And what mechanisms can you develop that really bring in and change the culture? I mean, there are simple things one can do, such as we decided as a department to two wave application fees or cover application fees for under-represented minority to apply to our program. That can be a real it seems like a simple thing, but that can be a real roadblock for many under-represented minorities to actually pay that $50 application fee to a number of universities. And having the opportunity just to apply for free gives them an opportunity that opens the door that they might not have otherwise. So I think what you have to do is come up with concrete mechanisms that really promote diversity inclusion we all are for it. But how do you actually accomplish that? I'll share with you as well that I had experiences. A chair is the typical thing that you often hear about that under-represented minorities and oftentimes women, when they're applying for a job, will freely under represent their, their skill set and and not asked for the proper resources that they deserve. And I had the interesting experience of having fast the faculty search and as chair where I had two candidates, we are hiring two people and they were they were both equally qualified for the position and acquiring both of them. But when we start talking about salary, the the the the under represented minority asked for far less than the other the other person has been hired and I said I brought them ended both at the same level to her surprise. And so those are things you have to be very sensitive to as, as a person in your organization that you can't just let people kinda things just happen. You have to make things happen and you have to make conscious decisions and employ mechanisms that actually support diversity inclusion. Thanks. I'm going to merge two questions along the same theme from flooding, jerk of its and touch on Apollo Nova that really have to do with the relationship, understanding the relationship between the Delaware Embry program and the Delaware CTR, Excel CTR. So really, you know how, which, what's your, what are your thoughts on injuries? Balance between basic translational clinical research. And how does Embry work with the CTR to sort of optimize those elements within a biomedical research infrastructure. Yeah, well, of course the emperor has to clinical partners which are very important role in the network. You know, it's, it's, it's embryo is meant to have a separate role from the CTR program, which is more clinical and translational. Although translation is in the the description of injury as well. So I think working with CTR to possibly generate co-funding for a student to participate in a clinical environment. Research from a sports perspective, developing workshops. Together with CTR, these writing workshops I talked about. That could be it's applicable to any student regardless of what your, your tendency is for a baby sick or whatever. And actually trying to partner and so that we can use our resources to cut across these boundaries. I am all about crossing boundaries. I think that's that's clear as a chair within my department, it's clear where I, where I actually developed this interdisciplinary neuroscience graduate program. And there's no reason there should be a boundary between V and CTR. We should work together to actually develop opportunities that we think are our a plus for both programs. So I think workshops for workshops, symposiums that we developed together that hit all the aspects to both programs are something that should be a part of the agenda. Great. One One more quick question. I apologize if I haven't been able to get to your all your questions. I think we've covered certainly most of them wide ranging conversation. So the last one, John, before we closed up, just just briefly, if you could comment on any thoughts you have about the opportunities to expand the Embry network, particularly in southern Delaware and the health care providers and institutions in southern Delaware, which might help expand some of the research demographic populations in other parts of the state. Yeah. I have I'll admit I haven't had a lot of experience or interaction with the Southern Delaware. I know there's a huge older population in southern Delaware. So there's certainly health care issues there that are unique to that area. And certainly expanding into clinical partners down there would be important. So I personally have had an investment in, in neurological disease which often involves aging, aging populations. And so I know that that will be a wonderful opportunities for students to be more involved in the health care system in southern Delaware? I don't have I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of experience in terms of knowing people in that, in that area. And that's something I can, I would have to explore if I actually KPI and understand what their interests are, enjoying the embryo and possibly developing a partnership. Great. Well, thank you for that. Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. I want to thank everyone for joining us and asking a wide range of important questions and topics for the next Embry PI to, to contemplate. So again, for those on the line, I've added into the chat, the link to the PI candidate survey that remains open through close of business on Monday. It's a brief survey that you can complete for each of the two candidates. Based on the way you interacted with the candidates, whether through these fora or smaller group meetings. So we really encourage this, the search committee really solicit your your feedback and input by that survey, both answering specific questions and open text boxes to provide a little bit more detail of your thoughts and impressions on the candidates. John, I want to thank you so much for your for your presentation, for your interest in the position. Obviously, this is a critical position for, for the state and for all of our partner institutions. And so we're, we're thrilled to have someone with your experience and talents interested in this position. So John, I think you've got a 15 minute break before your next meeting on a different Zoom link. And to everyone else, please fill out the survey and thanks for your participation and joy the balance of your day and week to character. I got it. Thank you.
Jeka INBRE PI Vision 09-23-2021
From David Barczak September 23, 2021
47 plays
47
0 comments
0
You unliked the media.
Two candidates for the position of DE INBRE Principal Investigator were invited to give a presentation based on their views of the program and their vision of the program's future. This was one part of John Jeka's interview process each candidate during their recent campus interview.
- Tags
- Department Name
- Research Office
- Date Established
- September 23, 2021
- Appears In
Link to Media Page
Loading
Add a comment