Alma Castro, MA, CIP

Sr. IRB Review Specialist
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Alma Castro is a Sr. IRB Review Specialist in the Office of Research Administration and Research Compliance (ORARC) at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Ms. Castro is responsible for reviewing IRB applications, providing educational training to the research community, developing guidance for investigators, testing the electronic submission system and producing data analytics for annual reporting purposes. Alma is part of the Harvard Catalyst Social, Behavioral, and Educational Research Subcommittee which is comprised of IRB professionals across local university and hospital IRBs. The Harvard Catalyst SBER Subcommittee is tasked with developing educational initiatives and materials and providing areas for engagement with the local research community.
Prior to joining ORARC, Alma served as an IRB Analyst for the Human Research Protection Office at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a Qualitative Researcher at the Office of Institutional Research at South Texas College. Alma earned a BA in Sociology from Boston College, a MA in Sociology from Texas State University San Marcos, and is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she will defend her dissertation in the fall of 2019. Alma’s dissertation, The Ethics Gap: How differing conceptualizations of ethics can affect the scientific enterprise and federal policy governing human subjects research, examines how social science researchers and IRB professionals understand and apply research ethics and how such understandings impact the IRB review process.

Presentation(s):

• A01 - Academic Ethics—How Social Science Researchers Operationalize and Exercise Research Ethics

  Sunday, November 17
  9:15 AM – 10:30 AM

• C05 - Benign Behavioral Interventions (BBI) in Practice

  Sunday, November 17
  3:15 PM – 4:30 PM