New Research Staff

When a new member is added to the CCN Lab research team, there are a few tasks that will need to be taken care of by lab administrators and by the new team member. This list is intended to prevent things from being overlooked.

CITI Training

Research team members are required to complete the CITI training courses online in order to comply with IRB requirements. Only after these courses have been passed with an 80% overall score can new members be added to any IRB-approved protocols in which research team members interact with participants or their data.

The CITI training course can be found at https://www.citiprogram.org.

New research team members, especially undergraduates without previous research experience, may not have an existing CITI account. If this is the case, making a new account is a fairly straightforward process. On the main page at the CITI training course there is a button to create a new account (Register).

1. Press the Register button
2. On the next screen, select your institution (SUNY - Buffalo) by typing SUNY in the text box. All the SUNY system schools will be suggested, with SUNY - Buffalo as the top choice (it's first, alphabetically). Select the SUNY - Buffalo entry from the list and click the Continue to Step 2 button.
3. Enter your name and UB email, as well as a back-up email if you have one
4. Select "no" to receiving continuing education unit
5. Department is Psychology
6. Select research assistant (if an undergraduate student)

Training Modules

Assuming you are registered and logged into your CITI account at this point, you will need to complete the following training modules:

1. Social and Behavioral Research Investigator Refresher (Question 2)
2. Social and Behavioral Responsible Conduct of Research Course (Question 4)

Quizzes

Each of these training modules involves reading a series of webpages, and answering a multiple choice quiz (usually 4 or 5 questions, randomly selected) at the end. Your quiz performance is displayed after you submit your answers, so you can see which questions you got right, and the rationale for the correct answers. You are required to get 80% overall to get your certification. If you don't pass a given quiz the first time, you can retake it right away, and as often as you wish.

Protip: Though the material on which you are being quizzed disappears when you click the 'Take the Quiz" link at the bottom of the page, if you select 'Open in new Tab' when you take the quiz, the test material will remain open in the original browser window. Just sayin'...

If you have any problems, the FAQ for CITI training can be found here.

Create an IRB CLICK Account

In order for a research team member to be added to the approved IRB protocol for any of the studies requiring continuing IRB oversight, they must have a CLICK account. If you have never before created a CLICK account, you're going to have to request one. If you already have one (e.g., through volunteering in another research lab), then you don't need to create a new one and can ignore this step.

Before you attempt to create a CLICK account, first ensure that you have completed your CITI training because the CLICK administrators will need to verify this before they approve your account. When you are ready, you can create a new CLICK account by visiting https://pacs.buffalo.edu/SponsoredPrograms/login to request an account.

Here, you can complete a simple form under Request Account. Your first and last name and campus email you should know. Your campus affiliation is the fourth item down in the drop-down list, 030 - University at Buffalo. Your department is Psychology, and you can indicate as your reason for request something along the lines of "Student research volunteer for a research project requiring IRB oversight".

This step is important, as you cannot be added to any of the fMRI projects unless you have a CLICK account. The approval process for your account application typically takes 1 or 2 days.

Conflict of Interest (COI) Declaration

If you have a CLICK account, you can go ahead and make a conflict of interest declaration here. This will be required to add you to any projects covered by our IRB.

Computer Access

Administrator

Lab administrators (the PI, permanent graduate students, postdocs) can submit a CASet work order to ask that the staff member be granted full access to the UBFS folder, as in the sample request below:

I am writing on behalf of Dr. Christopher McNorgan, who has been CC'd on this request and is the owner of the UBFS directory named below.
Access to ubfs/caset/cpmcnorg and to cast-psy341ws0[1-3].caset.buffalo.edu
is for the following UBIT ID(s):
UBIT_username
Thanks,
Your_Name

To submit one of these emails, visit the website at the URL above. Along the top menu, there is a Request Support tab. Then select General Computing Support on the page that follows. You will be asked to log in with your UB credentials. After you do so, you will see a web form asking for the details of the request.

The boilerplate text can be entered into the "Describe the issue below" textarea box. Fill out the rest of the boxes with what you think are probably the correct values. Be sure to put my email address in the CC box.

Note that this only has to be done once for a new lab member. It does not have to be repeated for each computer in the lab.

New Member

Once an account has been set up on at least one lab computer, research staff wishing to be able to carry out some tasks remotely should consult the lab wiki entry for SSH.

Most of our work will require that the user's .bashrc file is properly configured. After logging into the shell terminal for the first time, the new user should edit their .bashrc using the nano program:

cd ~
nano .bashrc

The default .bashrc contents will be displayed. Scroll down to the bottom of the document and add the following lines to enable FreeSurfer (unless the file has already been edited):

#FREESURFER
export FREESURFER_HOME=/usr/local/freesurfer
source ${FREESURFER_HOME}/SetUpFreeSurfer.sh 
#FSL
export FSLDIR=/usr/share/fsl/5.0
source ${FSLDIR}/etc/fslconf/fsl.sh
#AFNI
PATH=/usr/lib/afni/bin:$PATH

After these changes have been made, type CTRL-O to save the changes, then CTRL-X to exit the program and return to the terminal window. You can now re-parse the .bashrc file to update without logging out:

source .bashrc

You should now see some information about FreeSurfer written to the screen.

Wiki Edit Access

User accounts are required to make edits to the wiki. A lab administrator (the PI, permanent graduate students, postdocs) can set up new users using the wiki admin account.