What is Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Training?

RCR training is often required by granting agencies, universities, or departments.  Such training will help ensure that your research complies with what is required by existing regulations governing, for example, human subject research, animal subject research, data management, safety, mentoring, and conflicts of interest.  

Resources for RCR:

MSU Office of Research Compliance

Citi Program Research Ethics and Compliance Training

Why is RCR Training not enough?

There is a growing recognition that while compliance with existing regulations is necessary and important, it is not enough for cultivating ethical thinking and ethical behavior in STEM disciplines.  This is so for several reasons:

  1. Just because regulations do not prohibit something, does not mean that it is ethical or responsible.  Our actions as researchers can undermine trust in research, make difficult the sort of collaborations that are needed to maintain high quality research,  and can (even unintentionally) discourage access to participation in research. 
  2. The work that researchers do produces knowledge, health interventions, new technologies, and practices that impact individuals, communities, our health, our environment, and public policies.  While most researchers undertake this work in the hopes of improving lives and addressing the problems we face, actions can also carry risks, have unintended consequences, or benefit some groups more than others. 

STES' Role

STES is committed to cultivating ethical and socially responsive researchers by helping to identify and think critically about the values, principles, and virtues that should guide us as researchers and the potential social and ethical impacts of research.  We aim to do this by:

  • Facilitating research on difficult ethical problems and questions that arise in science, technology, and medicine
  • Integrating discipline-specific ethics education across the curriculum.
  • Increasing and enhancing engagement between researchers and stakeholders in order to benefit all stakeholders and make research more responsive to social needs, concerns, and inequalities.