The meeting was called to order at 4:30pm, by Dr. Bruce Leonard, Faculty Senate Chair

Health Education Center Scheduling – Dr. Erin McGoff, Director of Simulation, Health Education Center

Dr. McGoff announced the following:

HEC has a scheduling system in place and can accessed through the HEC Home page (https://www.utmb.edu/hec/home ) choose Faculty and HEC Standard Operating Procedures. Faculty are expected to prepare adequately for the scheduling of events. There are five floors of Cutting-Edge Simulation Facilities. Scheduling Human and Non-Human Simulation requests will be reviewed by the Director of Simulation (or his/her designees) for appropriateness, educational impact, availability of resources. If approved, SP availability, requirement for SP training, etc. will be assessed prior to setting a final date in the B-Line calendar. At that point, the primary contact will be notified of the final date(s) and time(s) for the course. At the discretion of the Director, requests may be reviewed by designated Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), or by the HEC Advisory Board (AB). After review, requests will either be approved, provisionally approved, held pending request for more information or rejected. If a request if rejected, coaching will be offered to help develop the scenario to meet simulation standards. Rejected requests can be appealed to the full AB (composed of SMEs from all the schools at UTMB). If a conflict should arise between 2 or more events trying to utilize the same rooms/resources, the AB will review and resolve the conflicts based upon the following factors:

• Summative vs formative
• Requirements for graduation/advancement
• Flexibility of one or more courses
• Established vs new event
• Educational impact of the activities
• Adaptability of one or more courses to utilize other rooms/resources.

Human simulation is scheduled at least six months and in advanced and non-human is scheduled at least two months in advanced.    

Cancellation of a course must be submitted  5 business days prior to the scheduled date with the exception of extenuating circumstances or unanticipated reason for cancelling.

Information Safety and Security Committee, Senator Claudia Hilton, the Faculty Senate representative on this committee announced some security restrictions forthcoming and shared her notes from their past meeting. (Notes was sent to the Senators Tuesday morning 12/15.) She went on to say that it is important for us to look at the proposal and provide input back to the committee. Dr. Leonard has invited Mr. Shaffer to attend the January Faculty Senate.  Questions brought up was,how will this affect the Cloud, Google docs, drop box and other applications as well as sharing research data with our foreign grant collaborators.

Once the Senators have read the email with Senator Hilton’s notes sent Tuesday morning, if you have any feedback or concerns, please send them to Dr. Leonard and Laurie Fentanes for them to gather to ask Mr. Shaffer at the January meeting.

Announcements – Dr. Leonard

Dr. Leonard stated that the Faculty Lounge will hopefully be opened once COVID has passed and he will send out some guidelines on how the faculty need to maintain it and keep it clean.

Dr. Leonard stated that he and Dr. Vasilakis attended the UT System Faculty meeting recently and heard from Archie Holmes, Vice Chancellor for Education. Dr. Leonard also talked about junior faculty and service and that other UT schools are looking at this as well as Junior faculty assembly.

Dr. Vasilakis stated that the Faculty Advisory Council and its executive committee have been discussing with UTS leadership about NTT faculty having three-year contracts. UTS leadership is receptive in developing guidance on the issue and ultimately each institution will have to develop its own guidelines.

Dr. Leonard stated that workload and Wellness are a couple of things being worked on.

Also, a reminder that the Clinical Committee (Drs. Aly, Glaser, Heard, Kelly, Khalife, Masel, Olson and Pacheco) needs to appoint their chair and co-chair.

Senator Stephens brought up the IHOP 11.01.08, Foreign Influence in Research Policy and asked if the Senate could invite Carrie Lee King and/or Toby Boenig to discuss this at an upcoming Senate meeting

The meeting was adjourned at 5:59 pm.

Next meeting: 03/08/21