National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke Awards the Society for Neuroscience $270,000 Grant for Three-Year Training Program
Washington, D.C. – The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) was awarded $270,000 from the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) for Foundations of Rigorous Neuroscience Research, a three-year scientific rigor training program focused on the "sociology of science." The new funding will enable SfN to develop and distribute in-person workshops, a virtual conference, digital toolkits, and online programming to the world-wide neuroscience community. The effort will be co-led by Lique Coolen, associate dean of the college of arts and sciences at Kent State University, and Oswald Steward, professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine.
"This new grant from NINDS will allow SfN to continue to provide members with exceptional training resources that are the foundations of high-quality science," said SfN President Diane Lipscombe. "Individual neuroscientists, their institutions, and the neuroscience community in general will benefit from the range of training opportunities developed through this program that aims to improve the design, analyses, and reporting in science."
Factors collectively referred to as the sociology of science include biases that can influence experimentation and interpretation; practices related to data collection, management, and sharing; and incentives that underlie career advancement and the stability of scientists’ research programs.
SfN is a leader in enhancing scientific rigor in the neuroscience community. In 2015, the Society began a three-year partnership with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), funded under a grant as a part of NIH’s Training Modules to Enhance Data Reproducibility, to produce a series of modules and a virtual conference offering additional training in scientific rigor to the entire neuroscience community. The collection, Promoting Awareness and Knowledge to Enhance Scientific Rigor in Neuroscience, features six webinar training modules, curated reading lists, articles, videos, online discussions, recorded in-person workshops, and a one-day virtual conference addressing various aspects of scientific rigor including planning experiments and data collection, minimizing bias in experimental design and execution, considerations for rigorous data analysis and reporting, and how the field can incentivize rigorous and transparent research practices.
The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 37,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.
