Administrative Core

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

CORE SUMMARY – ADMINISTRATIVE CORE The mission of the OSU SRP Center is to identify polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the environment, to characterize their toxicity, to specify the environmental concentrations of those chemicals below which they pose no threat to human health, and to identify safe, sustainable techniques for remediating PAH-contaminated sites. The Director and Deputy Director establish overall integrative research goals to advance the center’s mission. We select overall goals that require the projects and cores to collaborate, thereby ensuring that the center pursues more ambitious and impactful scientific and technological objectives that any individual component could achieve on its own. We focus the SRC on research that will provide direct decision support to interested parties in the near term or improve our capacity to provide decision support in the future. The Director holds a monthly one-on-one meeting with the leader of each Project and Core to review progress and key issues. She thereby gains the detailed understanding required to solve problems, identify synergies, offer guidance, evaluate opportunities, and coordinate with people within and outside of OSU. When the Director uncovers a need for resources, she discusses that need with the Project and Core leaders and with the Internal Advisory Committee, which helps us gain support from the university structure to achieve our goals. We have created a Research Translation Constituency Group (RTCG) with representatives of state and federal agencies. The OSU SRP Center faculty members and trainees will meet with the RTCG twice per year to discuss shared interests, opportunities to collaborate, and mentorships and internships for students. We will offer science-based decision support that constituents will apply to improve environmental public health. Our goals are to cultivate long-lasting relationships between scientists and constituents, open channels of communication, create an enduring community of scientists and interested parties, and build the environmental health literacy of constituents by teaching them where they can find state-of-the-art EHS information on demand. We have also created a Commercial Knowledge Transfer Group (CKTG) with representatives of commercial firms. We will meet with this group twice per year to explore shared interests. They will receive access to our extensive data repository, opportunities to conduct joint research with our faculty, invitations to workshops on cutting-edge topics, preferred access to students’ research presentations at invitation-only mini-conferences, invitations to meetings of our Projects and Cores, and educational opportunities for their staff. They expect to contribute paid internships, industrial mentors, guest lectures on topics aligned with their expertise, insights into unmet market needs, market pull for technology transfer, and help in refining our curricula to prepare our students to be productive early in their careers. Our goal for the CKTG is to transfer to industry all our knowhow and to give industry access to tools like our own, either directly or via collaborative agreements.