Ethics reviewers

Departmental members of staff who have been nominated as ethics reviewers may ethically review research projects.

Ethics reviewers shall be independent of the applications that they review (i.e. they must not have a conflict of interest with an application).

A minimum of 3 ethics reviewers will ethically review either a staff-led application or a supervised postgraduate researcher application.

A minimum of 2 ethics reviewers, one of whom is expected to be the Supervisor, will ethically review applications from supervised postgraduate-taught level and from undergraduate level students. In respect of such applications, normally the Supervisor is the 'lead' ethics reviewer.

'Lead' ethics reviewers

Each individual ethics review of an application shall include a 'lead' ethics reviewer, who has been chosen by the department's ethics administrator to 'lead' the ethics review. The role of the 'lead' ethics reviewer is to decide the ethics review outcome, having considered the comments of the different ethics reviewers involved in a review of an application. The 'lead' ethics reviewer may ask the ethics review panel to ethically review an application if s/he has concerns about the nature of the research.