Obtaining a Professional Certification: Responsible Conduct of Research Certification (6-8 points)

    On October 11th, I attended the Responsible Conduct of Research Certification event. It was held by Celina Jones in coordination with our Office of Undergraduate Research. The event focused on recognizing ethics in research and how to report research misconduct. Some key takeaways were that research misconduct can happen in a lot of forms such as abusing a mentor-mentee relationship, not following IRB and IACUC protocols, and even keeping all your research in one spot. These takeaways expanded my thinking by framing ethics in a way I have never thought about it before. I always thought about ethics as performing research that harms the patient, but it can also be research that harms the researchers or improper research records.

    While the event was long, I really enjoyed the real world examples and case studies about unethical practice. I would consider the real-world applications a strength of the event because they allowed me to take what we were learning about and situate it in practical situations, which allowed me to remember more. A weakness would be the length of the event as near the end, the energy of participation decreased because everyone was ready to leave. The event could possibly be improved by breaking up the training into four 2-hour sessions instead of one 8 hour one, that way people are able to stay engaged throughout.

    Our talk about ethics reminded me about the Social Justice Program and how black people are more adversely affected by unethical medical practices due to racism and the devaluation of black bodies. This is in part because the research done on black people in the past has been conducted in an unethical manner (forcing enslaved people to take part) and it was done under the pretense that black people experience less pain. These preconceptions manifest in medicine today by black people being weary to take part in medical studies, thus resulting in a pattern of black people receiving treatments not suited to them which is unethical. This activity contributed to my personal development by instilling me with a high ethical standard and shifting my desire to become a doctor to one that does everything ethically. I want to be a doctor that cares very deeply for the well-being of my patients, so in the future I will make sure that the research was done ethically before using it to treat patients. To build on this experience, I plan to take part in a lot of research in which I can use my training to yield good results.

- Taylar Wharton