BECON MEETING MINUTES

BECON MEETING - March 16, 2005

Minutes

The NIH Bioengineering Consortium (BECON) met on Wednesday, Mach 16, 2005, in Room 7111 of the Rockledge 2 Building in Bethesda , Maryland . The following text is the minutes for this meeting.

2005 BRP Grantee Meeting – The BECON BRP Grantee Meeting Subcommittee) met on March 14 to discuss the 2005 grantee meeting (the fifth annual meeting). There are approximately 160 BRP grantees for this year's meeting which is about the same as for 2004. A 1 2/3 day meeting is planned with some changes in the format relative to prior years.

BECON 2004 Symposium Final Report – The proposed final report for the BECON/BISTIC 2004 Symposium on “Biomedical Informatics for Clinical Decision Making” was distributed to BECON members by e-mail prior to the meeting. The plan is to post the report on the BECON and BISTIC Web sites and to send it to interested extramural persons after it is reviewed by BECON members.

Nanotechnology Issues – Brief summaries of recent activities associated with bionanotechnology were presented. These items concerned toxicological issues of nanotechnology and a recent workshop held to discuss centers to support the NIH Roadmap Nanomedicine focus area.

Team Science Issues – Progress and directions on team science issues at the NIH were discussed. One of the issues attracting a lot of attention is co-funding of grants among NIH institutes. Co-funding is not uncommon across the NIH, but there are still some critical issues that need to be addressed with the current primary one being which institute gets the ”credit” for the support. Another recent change related to team science issues is not including subcontractor indirect costs as part of principal investigator total costs for research partnerships. Efforts to address team science issues are continuing, and BECON members are very active.

BECON Interagency Activities – Current interagency activities involving bioengineering and multi-disciplinary collaborations and the value of BECON for interagency activities were discussed. In addition to the tangible benefits associated with interagency collaborations, these efforts also increase the visibility of the BECON outside of the NIH .

Next BECON Meeting – The next BECON meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, April 20, from 3 to 4:30 PM in Room 7111 of the Rockledge 2 Building in Bethesda . A preliminary agenda will be available about a week before the meeting.