Misconduct and Ethics Community call [March 15, 2022]

• Recording of the call
• Frazier Benya's slide deck
• Melissa Sortman's slide deck
• Jamie Lewis Keith's slide deck
• Letters from Societies Consortium’s Executive Committee

The March 15, 2022 call for the Misconduct and Ethics community focused on the intersection of funders and academia in mitigating  toxic workplace environments and unethical researcher behavior such as harassment (research misconduct is not the focus of this discussion).

The webinar was a panel of outside speakers including

• Frazier Benya, PhD, senior program officer at The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine
  • Dr. Benya is the Director of the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education and the Study Director for the 2018 report “Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine”
  • She works regularly with academic institutions to understand their policies in this space and brings a valuable perspective to how funders fit into the conversation as well
• Melissa Sortman, Director, Office of Faculty and Academic Staff Affairs at Michigan State University
  • She is the MSU representative on Frazier’s Action Collaborative and is works within her institution on codes of behavior
• Jamie Lewis Keith, Partner, EducationCounsel LLC, Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP (and member of the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM)

Webinar objectives included:

• To better understand university policies and procedures surrounding researcher misconduct such as harassment or creation of a toxic work environment
• To better understand how funders can put safeguards in place to prevent misconduct
• How funders and universities can best communicate to achieve the common goal of reducing toxic workplaces and harassment in academia