During the 2025 PRIM&R Annual Conference (PRIMR25) in Baltimore on Nov. 6-8, UConn Health’s Alison D. Pohl, MS, MT(ASCP), rLATg, CPIA and Lisa A. Chuba, BS, LAT were awarded the 2025 Pillars of PRIM&R Outstanding Poster Award.
Their award-winning oral and poster presentation was about the innovative programming efforts they developed at UConn Health for “Engaging the Research Community through outreach to Promote Animal Welfare and Compliance.”
The Pillars of PRIM&R Outstanding Poster Award acknowledges projects or efforts designed to improve the research ethics field. Only one abstract is selected for the annual award following the PRIM&R poster presentation program at the PRIM&R Annual Conference.
The UConn Health IACUC office’s poster presentation showcased their innovative, engaging experience, and fun interactive programming their office under UConn’s Office of the Vice President for Research created to promote and champion research compliance and make it a more collaborative, collective responsibility and relationship between researchers and the IACUC at UConn Health. The team leveraged ‘out of the box’ short, fun videos, compliance posters and contests, lunchtime learning events, and even quiz games to creatively enhance engagement amongst the institution’s researchers.
The non-profit PRIM&R, with a community of over 25,000 individuals, including 4,000 members from around the world, since 1974 has been ensuring the highest ethical standards in research. PRIM&R provides education, membership, and other professional resources to the research and research oversight community, including those who work with human research protections programs (HRPPs), institutional review boards (IRBs), animal care and use programs, and institutional animal care and use committees (IACUCs).
“Receiving this award has been rewarding and humbling,” says Pohl, the IACUC Administrator for UConn Health and its Research Compliance Monitor I under UConn’s Office of the Vice President for Research. “We try so hard each and every day to manage the IACUC in a way that helps our IACUC and our researchers. This is external validation that we are achieving that goal. It is great motivation to keep striving to promote a trusting and collegial relationship between the IACUC and our researchers we serve to the benefit of all.”
“I am truly grateful for this award,” says Chuba, Research Compliance Monitor II at UConn Health working under the UConn Office of the Vice President for Research. “It reflects all the hard work our team has invested, and it motivates me to continue looking for more outreach opportunities.”
The PRIMR25 Poster Review Committee applauded the UConn Health IACUC team’s abstract and programming efforts as innovative, writing: “This abstract describes considerable efforts to promote compliance institutional wide. The outreach of the program to connect with the research community served by the IACUC is considered innovative. The study provides ideas to use in other organizations.”
Pohl is Research Compliance Monitor II and IACUC Administrator for UConn Health. She’s been at UConn Health for 22 years and started in the IACUC office in 2003. She is also a member of the PRIMR CPIA Council and vice president of the IACUC Administrators Association.
Chuba has been with UConn Health since 2007 and serves as a Research Compliance Monitor I and also is the PAWS program coordinator for UConn Health.
“Join us in celebrating their achievement and the remarkable work shaping the field,” applauded PRIM&R.
Listen to learn more from PRIMR’s Research Ethics Reimagined podcast episode with the 2025 Pillars of PRIM&R Outstanding Poster Award winners Alison Pohl and Lisa Chuba from UConn Health.
