EVENTS
Assume in-person events have been cancelled and check with the organizer. Be sure to check out Webinars, below.
Wednesday April 1, 12-1:30 PM. On zoom: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/
View past talks on our Population Sciences channel. The Brown Bag talks have been organized into playlists: http://bit.ly/2kZvaME.
EVENTS
Assume in-person events have been cancelled and check with the organizer. Be sure to check out Webinars, below.
Wednesday April 1, 12-1:30 PM. On zoom: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/
View past talks on our Population Sciences channel. The Brown Bag talks have been organized into playlists: http://bit.ly/2kZvaME.
Monday, March 30, 2-3:30 PM. “The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes” Justine Hastings, Brown University. zoom. Contact camillen@berkeley.edu for information.
Tuesday March 31 11:30am-12:30pm. Ann Keller, Associate Professor of Health Politics. “Turning Off the Tap: New Strategies Undermining Science for Public Health” zoom. https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/
SAVE THE DATE
Tuesday April 7, 11:30am-12:30pm. Sandi McCoy, Associate Professor of Epidemiology. “Why social distancing can slow SARS-CoV-2: Insights from infectious disease epidemiology” zoom. https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/
ANNOUNCEMENTS
SPO Announcements regarding research operations that have been paused: The following *FAQs related to the administration of contracts and grants under *COVID-19 conditions are now posted on SPO’s website: https://spo.berkeley.edu/
*FAQs on Contract and Grant Funding reposted from the VC Research COVID-19 site: https://vcresearch.berkeley.
SPO Announcement regarding COVID-19 Proposals: Any COVID-19 proposal that is submitted to SPO that does not meet the VCR’s four-day deadline for SPO’s initial review will be automatically approved as a late proposal. There is no need for the PI to submit a VCR Late Proposal Approval Request, and the PI will not be charged with a late proposal. PIs should still submit the final version of the proposal at least eight business hours before the sponsor’s proposal deadline to ensure approval and timely submission. To ensure that SPO personnel are available to review and submit these proposals, PIs should complete and submit a COVID-19 Proposals Notification Form to alert SPO that a late COVID-19 proposal will be forthcoming. SPO will prioritize the processing of COVID-19 related awards and subawards. As awards are received from sponsors, SPO will expedite the review, negotiation, and set-up of these awards to ensure work on the project can begin without unnecessary delay. Outgoing subawards to Berkeley partners also will be expedited to the extent possible. When submitting the Subaward Request Form to sposubrequest@berkeley.edu please place “COVID-19” in the subject line to ensure a prompt response. If involvement with a for-profit entity is envisioned, PIs should review the Subrecipient vs. Supplier Wizard to ensure that the entity is categorized appropriately before submitting the request. Note: PIs should work with their assigned BRS/Department RA to develop and submit the proposal to SPO. All such proposals must be submitted to SPO through Phoebe. See: https://spo.berkeley.edu/
NSF: Some March Deadlines Extended. NSF recently announced March deadline date extensions for some solicitations and Dear Colleague Letters (DCLs) Please click this link for a list of the solicitations or Dear Colleague Letters (DCLs) with extended deadline dates. Additionally, NSF strongly encourages that you check the NSF Coronavirus Website regularly to critical updates.
Slack Channel. BRDO set up a slack channel to discuss COVID-19 funding: https://app.slack.com/client/
NIH Application Deadline Flexibility: NIH understands that the emergency declaration related to novel coronavirus (COVID-19) will adversely affect many NIH applicants’ ability to submit applications in a timely manner. Therefore, all grant applications submitted late for due dates between March 9, 2020, and May 1, 2020, will be accepted through May 1, 2020. This notice applies to all relevant funding opportunity announcements, including those that indicate no late applications will be accepted. Institutions need not request advance permission to submit late due to this declared emergency and a cover letter providing a justification is not required. See full announcement for details: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/
FUNDING
Internal and external funding opportunities related to COVID-19 are being posted on SPO’s website: https://spo.berkeley.edu/
MULTICAMPUS RESEARCH PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES. Systemwide research to strengthen the UC research enterprise Program Announcement (March 18, 2020): UCRI is pleased to issue the RFP for the 2021 Award Year. Applicants may apply for Planning/Pilot Awards or Program Awards. The deadline for Letters of Intent is Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 12:00 noon PT. Please see the How to Apply page to access the RFP and find more details. MRPI funding supports innovative multicampus research collaborations that strengthen UC’s position as a leading public research university. Awards are intended to facilitate outstanding research and cutting edge discoveries. Read the announcement here.
RWJF seeks applications from a wide range of city leaders-including chief planning officers, city health officials, and the organizations that work with them-who want to learn from and adapt ideas from abroad to help mitigate the unequal health harms of climate change in U.S. cities. Eligibility requirements suggest a collaboration would be appropriate. Learn more HERE.
CITRIS is offering a special RFP for funding to address Covid-19. See details on our website, this pdf, or share this short link: bit.ly/CITRISCOVID-19RFP. Applications due April 24 with relatively quick turnaround on decisions and funding.
IRLE Faculty and graduate student research award applications open: IRLE offers research awards to faculty and graduate students researching the dynamics and policies affecting workers, working life, and employment. Applications due April 24.
The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute was officially launched on Thursday, March 26. Berkeley is the co-lead along with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of this interdisciplinary, multi-university institute that is supported over a five-year period by a $57M cash grant from C3.ai and another $310M in-kind support from C3.ai and Microsoft. The C3DTI is focused on research and development, teaching and training, and academic-business-government partnerships that will advance the science of digital transformation and its application to industries and societal-scale systems. The Institute’s inaugural call for proposals is attached and also available here. The topic is focused on solutions to address the current challenges with COVID-19 and, more broadly, increasing the understanding of and preparedness for future pandemics. This topic is a pivot from what was originally planned, but is certainly timely! Proposals are due May 1, 2020 (a fairly quick turnaround) with awards expected by June 1.
AHRQ intends to publish a new funding opportunity announcement using the R01 mechanism to support novel, high-impact studies evaluating health system and healthcare professional responsiveness to COVID-19. The health systems research community should prepare to submit applications to AHRQ to fund critical research focused on evaluating topics such as innovations and challenges encountered in the rapid expansion of telemedicine in response to COVID-19, effects on quality, safety, and value of health system response to COVID-19, and the role of primary care practices and professionals during the COVID-19 epidemic. AHRQ is particularly interested in understanding how digital health innovations contributed to health system and healthcare professional innovation and challenges and solutions to meeting the needs of vulnerable populations including older adults, people living with multiple chronic conditions, rural communities, and uninsured and underinsured populations. AHRQ will encourage multimethod, rapid-cycle research with the ability to produce and disseminate findings as early as 6 months. AHRQ expects to invest up to $5M in FY2020 funds to support this initiative and potentially more pending supplemental funding. AHRQ is working to publish the FOA in early May 2020 with submissions due in June 2020. More info is HERE.
Notice of Special Interest: Health Services Research on Minority Health and Health Disparities (R01- Clinical Trial Optional). The purpose of this Notice of Special Interest is to encourage innovative health services research that can directly and demonstrably contribute to the improvement of minority health and/or the reduction of health disparities at the health care system-level as well as within clinical settings. This will be an R01. It has certain specific interests depending on the funding agency. Read the full announcement: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/
AHRQ intends to publish a new funding notice allowing requests for urgent revision supplements to existing AHRQ grants and cooperative agreements to address health system responsiveness to COVID-19. See: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/
AHRQ also intends to publish a new funding opportunity announcement using the R01 mechanism to support novel, high-impact studies evaluating health system and healthcare professional responsiveness to COVID-19. See: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is seeking applications for funding on research related to the abuse, neglect, and exploitation of elderly individuals. Proposed research may be focused on policy/practice at the federal, state, local, or tribal level. Eligible applicants include states, local governments, federally-recognized Indian tribal governments, nonprofit and for-profit organizations, and institutions of higher education. Complete application instructions are available on the NIJ website. Applications must be received by 11:59 pm ET on April 20th, 2020.
IRLE Faculty and graduate student research award applications open. IRLE offers research awards to faculty and graduate students researching the dynamics and policies affecting workers, working life, and employment. Applications due April 24.
CONFERENCES
INSNA Sunbelt Conference in June, Paris France. In person is canceled, pending some final contractual obligations.
CALLS FOR PAPERS
Journal of Family Theory & Review is currently soliciting theoretical or review papers examining the impacts of pandemic events (e.g., H1N1, SARS, COVID-19) on family processes. Learn more.
GRADUATE STUDENTS
MAXQDA is offering three students/PhD candidates the $1,600 USD #ResearchforChange Grant to support their fieldwork for on sustainability and sustainable development research projects. The deadline to apply is May 27th, 2020 and further information on can be found at www.maxqda.com/grants.
The Data Incubator’s Summer 2020 Fellowship cohort. Apply by April 3. Apply here!
California Policy Lab seeking summer GSR and summer research fellows. The graduate student researcher will work with newly available California administrative data from a range of state agencies. Fellows may work with CPL faculty and staff across our policy focus areas. Applications due April 3.
DATA
COVID-19 Surveys: Rob Santos of the Urban Institute started a google doc of organizations that are running surveys about COVID-19 and its impacts on people’s health and well-being: CREATE AND ADD
Understanding America Study: COVID-19 Survey Data: We have now released the data from our first survey. The codebook, topline results, and microdata are all found here: https://uasdata.usc.edu/page/
National Children’s Study. NICHD is issuing this Notice to alert interested investigators to the transfer of the NCS Vanguard Data and Sample Archive and Access System (NCS Archive) materials to the NICHD Data and Specimen Hub (DASH). The National Children’s Study Vanguard was a pilot study for a planned cohort study of environmental influences on child health and development. Starting in 2009, the study enrolled over 14,000 participants in over 5,000 families in 40 locations throughout the United States and followed them through 2014. It collected more than 14 million records and nearly 19,000 biological and 5,500 environmental primary samples from which a sample repository of over 250,000 items was created. That information and material was made available through the NCS Archive for approved research projects by qualified investigators beginning in March 2016. The materials from the NCS Archive site were made available through the NICHD DASH platform beginning March 17, 2020. The NCS Archive site will close April 20, 2020. In accordance with DASH requirements, NCS Archive data files were deidentified by removal of HIPAA identifiers prior to being transferred to DASH. Learn more here. The NICHD Data and Specimen Hub (DASH) is a centralized NICHD resource for researchers to share and access de-identified data from NICHD-funded research studies for the purposes of secondary research use. DASH also serves as a portal for requesting biospecimens associated with data stored in DASH.
ON THE WEB
NIH released a youtube video outlining flexibilities in dealing with the impacts of the coronavirus for grant recipients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Introducing pewmethods: An R package for working with survey data. Our new R package was originally envisioned as an internal way to reuse, maintain and share code. But since many of the problems that these functions were designed to solve are not unique to our projects, we’re making the package publicly available for other researchers who might find it useful. Links: Exploring survey data with the pewmethods R package; Weighting survey data with the pewmethods R package.
Zoom Meetings Security Information: With so many of us intensively using Zoom videoconferencing these days, I thought I’d share the privacy and other safeguard recommendations posted by UC Berkeley at https://security.berkeley.edu/
WEBINAR
Data Management the Tidy Way: An Overview of the Tidyverse in R. Sponsored by MAPOR (Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research). April 8th, 2020 — 12:00-1:00 CST. Among programming languages used in statistics and data science today, R is one of the more popular. For survey researchers and practitioners, the appeal of R extends beyond the fact that it is free, to the fact that it provides many packages suited for survey data analyses. This webinar provides an introduction to packages in the `tidyverse`, a simplified and cohesive environment that enhance data management and visualization. Specifically, this talk will discuss and illustrate several functions available through tidyverse packages that help you: import and merge datasets; create new and modify existing variables; and subset your data for analysis. Additionally, there will be a brief introduction to packages and functions for analysis of survey data. R code is provided that contrast these functions with their analogs in base R to help illustrate the power of the tidyverse. All examples provided in this webinar use datasets available in R packages so attendees can recreate these examples on their own. Presenter: Rebecca J. Powell, Ph.D. is a research survey methodologist at RTI International with a specialty in questionnaire design and analysis. Her main research focus is on improving survey response rates and quality through improving visual design in self-administered questionnaires and contact materials. Dr. Powell also conducts analyses on both survey paradata and substantive data in an effort to improve data collection efforts. She has a doctorate in Survey Research and Methodology from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, along with master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Applied Statistics from Rochester Institute of Technology. The webinar will last approximately 60 minutes including the Q&A that follows. Register: https://attendee.gotowebinar.
Measuring How Social Relationships Contribute to the Outcomes of Program Participants, April 1, 2020, 1:00–2:00 p.m. Central. The University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty presents this webinar, which will explore ways to measure and track how relationships and social connections contribute to human services program outcomes. Presenters will provide an overview of social capital; explore the value of logic models and approaches for documenting social capital inputs; and show how one program is tracking social capital to build evidence of success. Learn More | Register.
The Data Incubator’s Webinar on Data Science Tools. Get the insights into coding you need for a more successful application. Join us on zoom Tuesday, March 31 at 1PM ET for a practical data science demo: a live session with instructor Michael Cullen introducing the how and the why of data science. We’ll cover some common tools and techniques for exploring data and demonstrate how to use them to answer meaningful questions. If you don’t already have access to Jupyter notebooks and Pandas, make sure you get what you need before the session begins.
D-LAB
All D-Lab workshop instruction, events, and consultation are moving to online delivery for the rest of the semester. The D-Lab Collaboratory and Convening Room will be closed to the public during this time. We will assess and share decisions at a later date about how and when we will return to in-person delivery. Be sure to check the D-lab calendar at the website, dlab.berkeley.edu. D-Lab offers training, individual consulting and data services for the UC Berkeley community – faculty to undergrads.
RELATED LISTS
JOBS
All jobs and postdoctoral fellowships are posted as we receive them on the Demography Department Jobs Listserv, http://lists.demog.berkeley.
MIGRATION MAILING LIST
Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI.berkeley.edu) is a research center for the study of immigrants and immigration. BIMI has a mailing list which is where a good deal of immigration and migration announcements are posted, and only some of that material is posted on the PopSciences Weekly News. Sign up for it with this link
SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH MAILING LIST
Tue$day Top Tip$ for SPH Research is a listserv with research funding opportunities and other information pertinent to public health researchers who are not necessarily population researchers. To subscribe, write to Dr. Lauren Goldstein, lhg@berkeley.edu.