YNiC "Project Presentations" - why we do them

Before any research group starts a new project at YNiC, or when existing projects make significant changes and additions to their study, a ‘YNiC project presentation’ has to be made. Recently, David Coggan gave an excellent presentation that (more importantly) gave rise to constructive debate and discussion about the methods he is using and his recent research findings. His presentation and the following discussions are the essence of what these project presentations should be about. We have however received feedback that the reason for these presentations, and in some instances the ‘value of’ these presentations, is unclear to many. A few even perceive them to be a hurdle. We will take a few minutes to clarify why we encourage these presentations. What these presentations shouldn’t be seen as: • Practice job talks where you’re going to get difficult questions • A ‘rite of passage’ to use the facilities • A chance to steal ideas What these presentations should be seen as: • An opportunity for you to gain feedback on your research plan: Do not underestimate the wealth of experience in the wider YNiC community. Just think how many of our colleagues are currently running experiments, writing manuscripts and dealing with reviews; Colleagues who have tried to do similar things on the hardware you’re using and already have code to do most of it (.. this has happened ..); Colleagues who can lend you a better monitor to make your measurements on; Colleagues who have just come back from a conference and seen a poster on something very similar (.. this happens often ..); Colleagues who know that the ‘simple tweak’ you think you are making to your attention task actually has significantly higher processing demands on the brain; And what about the colleague who knows that you’ve missed a paper that has already published the result you’re after back in the 50’s (.. even this has happened ..)? Remember also that the presentations are often attended by colleagues from outside the Psychology department who may be able to give you insight into an application for your research, or a twist on your research that could lead to translational impact (.. this has happened and has lead to several grants ..). • An opportunity to assess your needs: Often, things that are trivial to do in a psychophysics lab do not translate trivially into a scanning environment. There may even be hardware or software changes on the horizon that may have an impact on your research plan: these are unlikely to be negative but can often be positive. Until we know what you are planning to do it is impossible to assess your needs. • (Counter-intuitively) An opportunity to get things moving faster: You will know that the project presentation is undertaken before the submission of the formal research ethics application. Although the detail in the ethics application is scrutinised and technical issues are raised, this process is typically slower as it has to be a ‘formal’ review of your research plan. When you receive this feedback, you may then have to make amendments and resubmit for trivial reasons that you have not taken into account in advance of the submission. Presenting your plan informally to an audience which (more than likely) includes the people who are going to review your formal ethics application can really help to speed the application process up. In short, project presentations are not meant to be a mechanism that is supposed to put another hurdle in your path; this process is intended to help you sail over many of the potential hurdles ahead that you may not even have thought about yet. So, who actually needs to do a project presentation? • All new projects (i.e. those that do not already have a project number at YNiC); • All projects with significant amendments to their current research ethics application (e.g. studies that are applying to the ethics committee to use a different set of stimuli or studies that want to tag on extra scans to tell them about structure in the brain). This excludes studies making small technical changes (e.g. making the scan a bit longer, showing a few more stimuli, changing the TR of the scanner, scanning 5 extra subjects to ramp up the power of their results). Do note that when any amendments are made to your protocol, the research ethics committee has to be notified even if a new presentation is not required. We look forward to hearing many more of your presentations in the future and very much look forward to being able to help you where we can (or just leaving you to it if you’ve got everything in hand). Please feel free to reply with any suggestions or comments. Andre’ (on behalf of the REC and YNiC team) ************************************************************************ Andre Gouws York Neuroimaging Centre University of York The Biocentre York Science Park Heslington YO10 5NY Tel: +44 (0) 1904 435327 Fax: +44 (0) 1904 435356