SP1: Coordination of the consortium

 

        

Title: Coordination and management of the consortium (IG)

 

 

1.      Principal Investigator

Prof. Dr. Rainer Spanagel (PhD)

2.      Research Goal

The overall goal of this subproject focuses on the management and coordination of the IG. The management structure and information flow is given in the organisational chart below and it is important to note that the present subproject will run closely in parallel with subproject 1 from our IA initiative in NGFN-Transfer (“Genetics of Alcohol Addiction: From Genes to Biomarkers and Individualised Medicine”). Although a variety of synergisms will be brought about by the merger of both coordination (IG & IA) subprojects, we should emphasise that, ultimately, they do not depend on each other in any critical way; thus, in the event that our NGFN-Plus IG but not our NGFN-Transfer IA will be funded or vice versa, the management structure of one of these consortia would not be affected.

3.         Work Plan
A -       Contract for the consortium

Our IG on “Genetic of Alcohol Addiction“ consists of 4 research projects which have been broken down for management and administrative purposes into 15 subprojects with 26 principal investigators plus 24 associated work groups with 34 Co-PIs (who will not be financially supported by NGFN-Plus). A variety of already existing genetic data sets, patient samples, animal models and novel techniques will be integrated from different partners into the IG. Thus, the consortium has to deal with complex clusters of information, which have to be protected for legal reasons and that have to be regulated for publications to be derived from the consortium. Therefore, together with the Steering Committee, one of the most important deliverables of the Coordinator is to accomplish a consortium contract within the first 6 months of funding.

B -       Communication within the Consortium

To ensure effective and constant communication of scientific progress in all aspects of the projects 1-4, the IG office will set up a website. This site will have password-protected access codes that will be available to all scientific contributors of the projects. All partners will be alerted to website updating by automated e-mailing. The site will also be used in facilitating the scheduling of meetings. In addition, the IG office will provide a bi-annual bulletin, wherein research highlights of the consortium and work progress will be briefly summarised.

C -       Monitoring

At the moment, it is not clear whether the BMBF will provide monitoring tools. Thus, monitoring of both the financial and scientific progress of the project will be administered by the project manager with regular personal contact to all PIs and via the IG website, where constant on-line access to the progress of the projects 1-4 will be ensured.

 

D -       Meetings and Workshops

Following a kick-off meeting in Mannheim in the first month of the funding period, we will have 5 annual meetings at different sites (Bonn, Berlin, Munich, Mainz, Mannheim), to which all PIs and researchers involved in the IG have to attend. The annual meetings will be scheduled for two days to ensure mutual interactions between all researchers.

Furthermore, we will have 5 workshops in the first 6 months with the aim of standardising and harmonising various applications. Thus, we will have one workshop on animal studies, one on mircroarray applications, one on GWA studies, one on phenotyping issues of our human samples and finally one workshop on neuroimaging.

E -       Promotion of junior scientists towards systems biologists

The Consortium is self-committed in taking action to support the scientific career of promising young scientists. We have therefore put two young scientists (Matthäus, Sartorius) in a position of a principal investigator and hope that NGFN-Plus funding of our proposal will catalyse their career development.

In essence, NGFN-Plus together with NGFN-Transfer may be considered as the first systems biology approach in alcohol research. Thus, regarding the matter of the funding of both consortia, we will invest a significant effort in the cross-disciplinary training of a new generation of researchers, who would tackle the multidisciplinarity given by a variety of high-throughput approaches (“omics” approaches) with ease. In the near future, the academic and biomedical industrial world will certainly display a great need for well educated systems biologists and NGFN funding could prove invaluable in training those researchers. Therefore, all students and postdoctoral fellows of our consortium will be trained in alcohol and drug abuse research across different disciplines (biology, psychology and medicine). Furthermore, method seminars on high-throughput technologies (e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics etc.), research colloquia presentations, defence and discussions of ongoing projects and research lectures from renowned foreign scientists in the drug abuse field would take place in Mannheim, Bonn and Berlin in conjunction with NGFN-Transfer. These activities will be interwoven and organised together with the already running activities of DFG Graduate Colleges and SFBs at the three mentioned locations. Moreover, junior scientist will have the opportunity to work on our different high-throughput platforms.