Scientific and Ethics Committee: General Interest or Nomination
General interest and nomination route. Herbal Trials is recruiting seven named seats on this Committee, each posted separately with its own qualifications and responsibilities. If one of them is clearly yours, apply to that seat directly rather than here. Use this entry to nominate someone else, or to register interest when your expertise spans several seats or fits none of them cleanly. The independent committee required by Article III of the Scientific and Ethics Oversight Framework. Its seats are empty today, and seating it is a mandatory prerequisite before any study can open. Herbal Trials must also establish the funding, protocol-development, statistical, regulatory, laboratory, safety, and operational capacity required for the proposed research. Not fewer than five members, including at least one with primarily scientific qualifications, at least one with primarily non-scientific qualifications, and at least one who is wholly unaffiliated with Herbal Trials. The Framework permits a minimum of five members. Herbal Trials has chosen an inaugural structure of seven voting seats, because a five-member roster could be compromised by a single recusal, absence, vacancy, or need for specialized review.
- Compensation
- Volunteer (uncompensated appointment)
- Participant-facing
- No
- Credential required
- No
- Training before activation
- No
- Conflict review
- Full disclosure & review required before appointment
- Estimated future need
- Required before the first study can open
Important boundaries
- The Committee is not yet seated. No human-subject or animal-subject research commences until the Board confirms that all mechanisms required by the Framework are operational (§13.2). Before such research begins the Board must either seat this Committee or retain an external IRB, IACUC, or other independent ethics body qualified under applicable law to perform its functions (§3.1). Herbal Trials is seating the Committee.
- This Committee is an institutional scientific-governance and pre-review body. It does not replace an Institutional Review Board. No human-subject study may open solely on the Committee's review; applicable studies must also receive approval from an appropriately constituted independent IRB.
- Members review protocol design, botanical standards, manuscripts, and evidence grading. They do not conduct the research they review.
- The Committee has independent authority to approve, require modifications in, disapprove, suspend, or terminate any research activity within its jurisdiction. No officer, director, funder, or other person shall override a determination of the Committee except through a documented appeal to a second independent ethics committee (Framework §3.4).
- No member may participate in the initial or continuing review of a project in which the member has a conflicting interest, except to provide factual information. Members sign annual conflict-of-interest disclosures (Framework §3.3).
- Service may initially be voluntary while Herbal Trials raises startup funding. The organization intends to build the financial capacity to support qualified scientific, medical, ethical, statistical, and regulatory professionals responsibly as operations grow. Any compensation, reimbursement, or professional-services arrangement must be properly approved, documented, reasonable, and administered under the organization's conflict-of-interest procedures. Compensation does not replace or reduce a member's duty to exercise independent scientific and ethical judgment.
What your application includes
- Profile & contact
- Governance & independence
- Conflict-of-interest disclosure
- Document uploads
What to have ready
A CV or résumé is part of every profile. For this role, also have:
- Independence & conflict-of-interest attestation
- Statement of interest
- Publications / area of expertise
What we’ll ask you
How you run the day-to-day of a study, and how you protect the people in it. Everyone also answers a few shared questions on research integrity and why this work. You answer these in your private portal after verifying your email. Your answers are stored with your private application and may be reviewed by authorized personnel when the role becomes active. They are never scored or rejected solely by an automated system.
- Walk us through how you'd run an informed-consent conversation from greeting to signature, including how you'd handle a participant who seems unsure.
- The day before a monitoring visit, a source document and the EDC don't match. What do you do?
- How do you keep a demanding recruitment or visit schedule without ever pressuring or over-promising to a participant?
- Describe your coordinator experience — study types, systems (EDC/CTMS), consent and source documentation — and what you handled independently. (optional)
- Participant safety and honest data sometimes conflict with hitting enrollment targets. How do you hold that line? (optional)