Office of Research Integrity and Assurance

About Us

Mission

Our mission at ORIA is to:

  • Nurture and promote state-of-the-art research, scholarship and creative work at Mason;
  • Provide resources promoting ethical and responsible conduct of research; and
  • Assist the Mason faculty, post-doctorate and student community with the identification of external funding opportunities, development of high-quality proposals, sponsored projects and translational activities.

The office staff provides services that:

  • introduce Mason PIs to new and existing funding opportunities;
  • facilitate the formation of effective multidisciplinary teams both within Mason and with other external partner organizations;
  • result in the creation of higher quality, collaborative proposals;
  • ensure productive relationships with colleagues in other Mason units including the Office of Sponsored Programs and Corporate and Foundation Relations;
  • ensure the Mason community is knowledgeable about and complies with federal and other relevant regulations that pertain to the ethical and responsible conduct of research;
  • identify compliance risks and communicate those risks to the Mason community;
  • and finally, monitor and investigate instances of noncompliance, demonstrating the University’s commitment to practice to the highest ethical standards in research and scholarship.

Functions:

The Office of Research Integrity and Assurance provides support for implementation of research integrity programs. This includes:

ORIA also supports four faculty committees that review and monitor research activities to address the above programmatic needs:

  1. The Conflict of Interest Committee reviews significant financial interests of research investigators.
  2. The Research Misconduct Committee reviews allegations of misconduct at the investigation stage.
  3. The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is responsible for review of all research activities involving human subjects otherwise not exempt by federal guidelines.
  4. The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) reviews all research with vertebrate animals.

The office also works collaboratively with various other research support and compliance offices on campus to ensure appropriate support for researchers and to eliminate redundancies or inefficiencies in implementation of these requirements.

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