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Crossroads: Sharing Social Environment & Genetic Data Meeting

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is pleased to announce NIDA's Crossroads: Sharing Social Environment & Genetic Data Meeting, which will be held from December 8 through 9, 2008 at the Embassy Suites Hotel at the Chevy Chase Pavilion, Washington, DC. In order to enhance data sharing and to understand the data infrastructure necessary for next-generation systems science, which will help to alleviate drug abuse, this meeting will focus on sharing social environment and merged social environment and genetic data. Particular emphasis will be placed on identifying barriers and developing recommendations to better facilitate data sharing. Social environment data (SED) are data that include rich environmental, phenotypic, and individual non-biological information, while merged social environment and genetic data (SEGD) include SED but also are linked to, or include, genetic data.

The objectives of this important meeting are to

1. Explore the current culture of sharing drug abuse SED and merged SEGD, and considering examples from areas of research outside of drug abuse.
2. Highlight data sharing experiences, including consideration of working with shared data, other investigators, institutions, and institutional review boards (IRBs).
3. Highlight the infrastructure that must be in place in order to facilitate sharing.
4. Discuss recent advances and strategies for sharing, including strategies that ensure the protection of human subjects.
5. Identify the next steps for sharing drug abuse SED and SEGD to ensure vertical integration in a collaborative research environment.

This meeting will initiate a dialogue focused on the sharing of SED and SEGD in the field of drug abuse. Questions to be addressed include the following:

1. What are the implications and realities of data sharing for principal investigators, subjects, local IRBs, and the scientific community?
2. How does a particular scientific community’s culture of sharing influence the practical implementation of conducting research with complex data sets?
3. What can be done to better facilitate sharing these types of data?

The expected outcome of this meeting will be a set of recommendations identifying steps to facilitate the sharing of SED and SEGD and to enhance the data infrastructure necessary to conduct next-generation systems science to alleviate drug abuse.

Background

Data sharing has been identified as being integral to transdisciplinary science and as necessary for collaborations that will help to solve society’s most urgent health challenges. NIDA strongly encourages data sharing as part of promoting a systems science focus on integration across biomedical, behavioral, and population domains to generate scientific breakthroughs in health that are unlikely to be discovered by working in isolation. This parallels the programmatic directions laid out by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). NIDA has been at the forefront of supporting the collection of longitudinal data that contain rich environmental data, the supporting studies investigating gene and environment interplay; encouraging new spatial and analytical methods, and encouraging data sharing. However, the realities and implications of sharing for principal investigators, subjects, and scientists are unique and complex, and require a collaborative process across institutions and disciplines. These complexities have rarely been explored.

We hope that you will be able to participate in this important career development event.

For the agenda and meeting presentations, click here.

For meeting logistical information, please click here.

To register for this meeting, please click here.

To view information for meeting and logistical contacts, please click here.