Implementing a Comprehensive Research Compliance Program

The senior research compliance administrator has emerged as a critically important position as universitiesand other research organizations face an increasingly intricate regulatory environment. These administratorsare tasked with a special challenge: ensuring that their institutions conduct safe ethical and compliantresearch while also helping researchers understand and meet compliance requirements and achieve theirresearch goals. These competing responsibilities can make the role of the research administrator complex;however those who serve in this role may find that they have limited preparation for the challenges and littleor no formal education in the field.Thus the goal of this handbook is to provide practical guidance to research administrators who areresponsible for a wide variety of compliance programs. Previous volumes on these topics have focusedprimarily on educating research faculty staff and students. An assumption in many of these handbooks is that all additional questions related toresearch ethics and regulations should be directed to the senior research administrator; yet the books have limited guidance intended for the seniorresearch administrators themselves. This handbook is designed therefore to serve as a detailed program implementation manual for theseadministrators who are expected to be conversant on a broad range of complex ethical and regulatory topics and to provide guidance to thoseconducting research as well as upper administration and others interested in safe ethical and compliant research.