Executive Roles, Responsibilities and Scripts
Mock Review Toolkit – Project Grant Competition: Running the Simulation
For Facilitators: If the meeting is in-person, this resource is printed and distributed to participants during the meeting. If the meeting is virtual, send this resource as an attachment with the Confirmation of Committee Meeting email prior to the meeting. Please remove this instructional text before sending to participants.
Chair
It is the Chair's responsibility to ensure that the review committee functions smoothly, effectively and objectively, and that a positive, constructive, fair-minded environment in which research proposals are evaluated is established and maintained.
The Chair will:
- provide opening remarks to the committee, including an outline of the structure and agenda of the day.
- explain the meeting process to the committee, including the review of SGBA considerations in the applications.
- briefly discuss the budget and term components and remind Reviewers that they are not part of the Committee meeting.
- ensure that all committee members who are in conflict with an application leave the meeting room before the discussion of the application.
- appoint a delegate as Chair or Scientific Officer when either individual leaves the meeting room due to a conflict of interest with an application or for any other reasons.
- fulfill an oversight role – does not rate applications nor vote during the Committee meeting.
- ensure the involvement of the entire committee in evaluating each application.
- work with the Scientific Officers, as required, to summarize the discussion around each application, before the consensus rating is reached.
- ensure that a consensus rating is reached by the assigned Reviewers.
- ensure that specific ethical concerns and other CIHR requirements are addressed, and that any related discussion is captured in the Scientific Officer notes.
Scientific Officer
The Scientific Officer (SO) assumes the role of note taker.
The SO will:
- take official notes of the committee discussions for each application (SO Notes). The SO Notes should provide the applicants with insight into the committee discussion of their applications. They should be clear and concise and give objective and constructive feedback to the applicants. They should:
- include the strengths and weaknesses of the applications discussed by the committee.
- address the issues that had the greatest impact on the evaluation, as they relate to the program's evaluation criteria.
- address aspects of the committee discussions that were not captured in the Reviewers' reports.
- describe how Reviewer disagreements, as seen in the individual Reviewer reports, were reconciled by identifying which view was favored by the committee.
- read back the SO Notes to the committee for validation and for additional input before a consensus rating on each application is reached by the assigned Reviewers, and all the members' votes are cast.
- ensure that special considerations related to ethics and/or other issues are also recorded in the SO Notes, if applicable.
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