September 28, 2006
Moe named acting head of Human Subjects
Karen E. Moe, research associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has been named acting director of the Human Subjects Division. Moe, who has been serving as the assistant director at human subjects for the past two years, replaces longtime director Helen McGough, who is retiring Oct. 6.
Moe has been largely responsible for the daily operations of human subjects for the past year — guiding the division’s accreditation process, managing the hiring of new staff, and arranging for the division’s transition to a new database.
McGough, who has led Human Subjects for the past 20 years, has seen the number of applications handled by the division more than quadruple during her tenure, from about 1,200 to about 7,000 each year. Three new internal review boards have been added since she assumed the directorship in 1987, and two more will be in place within a year’s time. She was instrumental in establishing cooperative review agreements with many local research institutions, with the Western review board, and with the Cancer Consortium review board.
“Helen guided the internal review boards through their first reviews of HIV/AIDS related research and emergency medicine research, and has played an important role in facilitating collaborative review of UW international research,” said Mary Lidstrom, vice provost for research. “Helen has made immeasurable contributions to the UW and its research program. It’s been a privilege working with her over the past year, and I’m grateful that she’ll continue working with us on a project basis.”
McGough serves as a member of the boards of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research and of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal IRB, and has been a study section reviewer for NIH. She is a founding and contributing member of the Collaborative IRB Training Initiative, an organization that has provided hundreds of institutions and hundreds of thousands of researchers with Web-based education in the protection of human research subjects. She is frequently invited to speak at national conferences, and mentors internal review board administrators in this country and abroad.
McGough previously served the UW as a human subjects review coordinator and as a coordinator for the Office of Sponsored Programs. Before coming to the UW, she directed a non-profit family services organization and taught anthropology at Hong Kong University and the University of Vermont. McGough will continue working with human subjects over the next couple of years on special projects related to research compliance and the protection of human research subjects.
Moe, the new acting director, said three of her priorities for the near future will be improving the review process for research involving minimal risks of harm, implementing an electronic submission and review system for internal review board applications and revising and expanding policies, procedures, guidance, and forms to help researchers, the boards, and human subjects staff.
