The Advanced Certificate Program in Research Ethics for Central and Eastern Europe, sponsored by Union Graduate College (USA) and Vilnius University (Lithuania), is hosting a meeting of its current trainees, alumni, and other Fogarty Program faculty and students in Prague from July 2nd through July 4th, 2012.

The purpose of the meeting is to highlight and share experiences in strengthening research ethics capacity in low- and middle-income countries, and to build a network to support future collaborative action.

Topics to be discussed include: best practices in teaching research ethics to international students; challenges faced by research ethicists working in low- and middle-income countries; current understanding (or lack thereof) of research ethics review practices and policies in various countries and regions of the world; approaches for building and maintaining robust research ethics infrastructure in the face of economic instability and political uncertainty; and  opportunities for developing new national and international collaborations in research ethics.

We would like to invite interested faculty, students and alumni from other Fogarty-funded training programs to submit proposals for oral presentation, panel sessions, papers and “laptop” posters (in which presenters describe research findings or best practices on a laptop computer to a small audience).

A brief abstract of 250-300 words should be submitted no later than Thursday, March 15th, 2012. Abstracts should be submitted via email to the Organizing Chairs at philpots@uniongraduatecollege.edu.

All abstracts should be in Word or RTF formats and contain the following information:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) type of presentation (oral paper, panel or poster), and g) 3 keywords.

Panel presentations should consist of three to four abstracts organized around a central topic of direct relevance to the conference theme. Please use a plain sans serif 12-point font and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). 

The conference organizers will acknowledge receipt and answer all proposals submitted. Acceptances will be sent to submitters no later than Monday, April 2nd, 2012.

For the conference organizers:

Vilius Dranseika (Lithuania)
Eugenijus Gefenas (Lithuania)
Sean Philpott (USA)
Marty Strosberg (USA)