Human Subjects Certification

Anyone that works directly on research, especially research that includes identifiable data of research participants, must complete human subjects training and maintain human subjects certification. Training ensures staff are aware of ethnical principles and guidelines involved in the protection of human subjects in research processes, initially established in The Belmont Report. At J-PAL North America, this requirement generally applies to all staff in the Policy and Research verticals, as well as staff in the Finance & Operations vertical that are involved in the research process or coordinate the certification process.

The default course required by J-PAL is the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI Program) course titled "Social & Behavioral Research Investigators", which is valid for three years from the completion date. This course is offered through the MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES), which is MIT's Institutional Review Board (IRB). In some cases, staff may have completed alternative courses to meet this requirement (e.g. training by the National Institutes of Health) or have additional CITI or other course requirements based on the research they will be involved in.  If you are unsure about specific requirements for your position, please check with your supervisor or the research manager for the project(s) you will be working on. 

To access the CITI Program course:

• Go to the MIT COUHES website at http://couhes.mit.edu/training-research-involving-human-subjects 

• Follow the instructions for logging into the CITI website for MIT users - note that logging into your Kerberos account will be required at this stage

• Create an account on the CITI Program website and navigate to the Social & Behavioral Research Investigators course (or other applicable courses as needed) to begin the course.

  • • 1. If you have completed a CITI course prior to your employment at MIT/J-PAL from another institution, such as a previous job or school program, it may meet some or all of the module requirements for MIT certification. Upon accessing the CITI Program, you should have the option of affiliating your account from your previous institution with your MIT account. This will apply any currently valid course completion to your MIT/J-PAL requirement

      2. Please note that there is another course titled Social and Behavioral Responsible Conduct of Research. While similar sounding, this is a separate course that will not meet the default requirement for human subjects certification.

  • To receive certification, required course modules must be reviewed and corresponding quizzes must be completed with a minimum passing score. Upon completing the required modules, you will receive two documents: a completion report (transcript) and a certificate.

Each J-PAL office is responsible for appointing regional contacts to coordinate the human subjects certification process, update training completion in Salesforce and respond to questions; for J-PAL North America, regional contacts are Fatima Vakil, Senior Operations Associate (Research), and Isaak Kifle, Human Resources Manager. Upon completion of your initial or refresher training course, please send the certificate to Fatima at fvakil@povertyactionlab.org  and Isaak at ikifle@povertyactionlab.org. You do not need to send the completion report/transcript.