Undergraduate Research Training Program

Identify a Research Supervisor that will assist and guide you through your undergraduate research experience. Your Supervisor will be your mentor and go-to person during this process and should be aware of Research Supervisor responsibilities. You and your Research Supervisor may find our URTP handout helpful.  The handout provides an overview of the URTP, an outline of roles and responsibilities, and frequently asked questions.

Attend one of our IRB-led URTP Trainings to learn about what types of research require IRB review. Also offered in these sessions are best practices for conducting ethical research, an overview of human subject protections, and additional resources that may be helpful to you. If you’re unable to attend an IRB-led training, you may complete an Online CITI Training via the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) website. While online training is available, the IRB-led training is the preferred option. Whether or not your undergraduate research project requires IRB review, ethics training is a required part of the URTP.

Check out the URTP Student Guide (PDF), which is an overview of the regulations that govern human subject research, tips on conducting ethical research whether or not IRB review is required, things to avoid when conducting research with people, and useful resources and contact information to guide you through the URTP process.

Once you have met with your Research Supervisor, have a good idea of the research you are conducting, have taken training (either in person or online), and read through the Student Guide, you are ready to complete the URTP Decision Form! The URTP Decision Form is a Qualtrics survey which will guide you through the process of whether or not IRB review is required and indicate whether next steps are needed. For an idea of what questions you will be asked in this survey, see the URTP Decision Form Preview (PDF) 

Be aware of our template documents, which may be helpful to you as you complete the Decision Form:

• The Student Application template may be used to describe the study that you plan to undertake. The document will guide you not only through the logistical aspects of study development but also inquire on study population, study location, and other potential risk aspects.
• The Student Information Sheet is a document that you can use with your study participants. It is modeled after the IRB informed consent template and contains information that is relevant to student research.

Maintaining privacy and confidentiality is essential to the protection of human participants, whether or not IRB review is required. If confidentiality of research data is not maintained, a participant might experience risks to reputation, employment, financial standing or insurance coverage. Information about subjects' activities may place them at risk of legal action as well. 

Privacy and confidentiality are different concepts:

• Privacy is personal and can be defined in terms of having control over the extent, timing, and circumstances of sharing oneself (physically, behaviorally, or intellectually) with others.
• Confidentiality relates to data and pertains to the treatment of information that an individual has disclosed in a relationship of trust and with the expectation that it will not be divulged to others in ways that are inconsistent with the understanding of the original disclosure without permission.

Both privacy and confidentiality should be considered when interacting with people and their information, irrespective of whether a project requires IRB oversight. More information on this topic may be found in the URTP Student Guide. 

Rigorous data security is a key step in protecting information from an accidental or malicious breach. Data security includes:

• A plan to manage the physical and electronic documentation associated with the project, such as paper surveys, signed consent forms, or documents that contain contact information for subjects and
• Steps to ensure that those materials are not lost or accessed inadvertently by an unauthorized person.

Explore HUIT's Tools and Services for Students site to find general information on how to protect your research data and important links to data security resources. Webpages for data security resources indicate which members of the Harvard community have access to them. For example, the 1Password Password Manager page includes a banner listing the groups and schools (including Harvard College students) that can use that resource. Harvard’s Information Security and Data Privacy (PrivSec) site summarizes the University’s data security classification levels and maps those levels onto IT resources. Privsec also provides critical information for protecting your personal devices on their Best Practices - Your Personal Device page.