Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects
The Lafayette College Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviews all research involving human participants conducted by Lafayette College faculty, students, and staff, as well as research by outside investigators involving Lafayette students or personnel.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services requires all colleges and universities to have IRBs in order to protect human participants involved in research. It is the responsibility of those IRBs to ensure that investigators comply with the relevant federal regulations and ethical guidelines set forth by the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP).
Any member of the Lafayette community—including faculty, staff, or students—who conducts research involving human participants must receive approval before any data collection or interaction with potential research subjects begins.
Lafayette IRB requires that all researchers whose proposed research falls in the full or expedited review category provide evidence of having completed a training course on conducting research with human subjects, such as the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) “Protecting Human Research Participants” course or CITI Program’s “Social-Behavioral-Educational (SBE) Basic” course. If you do not have such training, please complete the CITI Program training course prior to submitting your proposal to IRB. You can find instructions on how to access the course here.
The IRB submission process is completely online. The application form can be reached by clicking on the sidebar titled “Submit an IRB proposal,” and all supporting documents can be uploaded directly during the submission process.
Before submitting an application for IRB review, please visit the relevant links listed in the sidebar for information about the types of review, the submission process, and other pertinent information.
Important Note: The Final Revisions to the Common Rule (i.e., revisions to the federal requirements that govern IRB) are now effective. Therefore, before submitting a protocol for IRB review, please review the Lafayette IRB web pages for the current regulations, procedures, informed consent document template, and application forms. .
If you have any questions about the IRB submission process, contact the current Chair of IRB at irb@lafayette.edu.