In AP Research class, High Tech students are currently working on coming up with an interesting, fun, and valid research topic that they can experiment with throughout the course of the year. Students explore different areas of interest, read about significant topics today, and utilize other resources to gather information to create an abstract and inquiry proposal form that they send to the IRB panel members. IRB, which is short for Institutional Review Board, is a committee of teachers and other experts in our school that review the students’ proposals and give them assistance, comments, and guide students with their research. The IRB is a committee that was created to approve research proposals involving human subjects, and the main purpose of the committee is to protect the rights of these human subjects that may be experimented on. Students seeking IRB approval for their research must first secure the approval of their teacher prior to submitting their application for IRB.
The second IRB panel meeting was on December 6th, 2022, where they discussed the proposals that students had sent to the IRB and the committee came to a conclusion on each student’s experiment (approving or disapproving) based on the significance, relevance, and benefit of the experiment, as well as its impact on the human subjects. The High Tech IRB panel members include: Nina Lavlinskaia, Arun Srivastava, Jude Balsamo, Samantha Doria, Antonio Fuda, Shelly Witham, Mark Gutmann, Dimitri Lavlinski, Elektra Paslowski, Sabrina Vargas, Maria DeMarzo, Maria Mullahey, Joseph Ona, Jeremy Stanton, Catherine Yuhas, Adriana Medina, Jamie Velazquez, Krystyne Guarente and Yaniris Maldonado. Dr. Nina, the AP Research teacher at High Tech, says “I’m very thankful for all the teacher’s hard work and the time that they devote to guide the students to view things from a different perspective and overall improve their research process.” Together, these teachers and experts share their experience from different backgrounds to guide the students at High Tech towards reaching their research goals.
BY AYUSHI PATEL