You may have heard of the Stanford prison experiment — or the Milgram obedience experiment — or other ethically questionable research involving human subjects that came close to seriously endangering their participants.
As it turns out, even some experiments that are seemingly low risk to human participants can cause unintended harm without proper oversight; today, the risks are mostly privacy breaches, or identity protection issues.
This is where Tricia Mayhew-Noel, the Director of Research Compliance and Ethics at CCNY, comes in.
Mayhew-Noel’s responsibilities include ensuring the huge batch of human subjects research and proposals at City College are designed to keep everyone safe, and to ensure their private information is secure.
“At CCNY, we have a lot of social and behavioral research,” she said in an interview with The RICC. “We also have some biomedical studies, we see neuro-behavioral studies, and we see some robotics as well. Mainly they do surveys, but sometimes you would find them dealing with depressive disorders, or taking someone’s weight for research purposes — these can be sensitive topics.”
At each institution where research involving human participants takes place, an Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviews the study proposals, working in a committee with researchers and community members, to make sure studies comply with federal, local and institutional ethical guidelines. At CUNY, these regulations are directed from the CUNY Office of Research, Universal IRB (UI), and passed down to each college’s Human Research Protection Program (HRPP) office. As City College’s HRPP Administrator, Mayhew-Noel acts as the liaison between CUNY’s UI and the HRPP office.
When her office receives an IRB submission, they do an administrative review, first checking whether it meets the criteria for human subjects research, set forth by the Department of Health and Human Services regulations. They then determine whether the study is minimal risk and may be reviewed as exempt or expedited review; if the study is greater than minimal risk it will be reviewed by the full IRB committee. When the review is complete and further action or additional information is needed it is sent back to the researcher, to either accept or make the pending necessary changes.
Mayhew-Noel began her role at City College in 2011, originally hired as the IRB Administrator at a time when each CUNY college administered their own IRBs, before being appointed as a board member and administrator for City’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Assuming other research compliance roles at City College led to the creation of the Office for Research Compliance and Ethics, which she now oversees.
For her undergraduate degree Mayhew-Noel double-majored in biology and general sciences at Medgar Evers College before getting her Master’s degree in health policy analysis at The New School. She then taught science classes, such as Microbiology and Anatomy and Physiology, to high school students for a few years.
While teaching, she saw a role open at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. They were looking for someone with a science and teaching background to help manage their IRB.
“That propelled me to use my teaching background, my science background and bridge into policy with my educational background,” she said. She had to learn “on the fly,” but the fast dive into IRB helped her in the long run.
Now at City College, where she wears many hats, Mayhew-Noel encourages students with research ideas involving human participants to pay her a visit before beginning to draft their IRB application. Otherwise, students will need to draft, submit, rewrite and resubmit — often multiple times — to make sure all the proper IRB guidelines are followed. It’s better to know what’s required beforehand.
But one of the dual purposes Mayhew-Noel’s role serves that makes her happiest comes out of that back and forth between study proposals; with each amendment, student researchers can learn some of what future IRBs will expect from them, preparing students for a lifetime of research.
“I use it as a teaching moment for them,” she says about working on study proposals with student researchers. Her office is always open, she said. “We want to make sure that what they’re doing, they do it right.”
Judah is a senior at CUNY Baruch College, pursuing a major in journalism and minors in computer science and environmental sustainability. He is also the business editor for Baruch’s independent student newspaper, The Ticker, and co-managing editor for the Baruch Journalism Department’s magazine Dollars & Sense.