Institutional Review Board (IRB)

Exempt Projects

The main categories of human research that can be considered exempt from the human subject federal regulations by the PPHS can be found in our Guidelines and Policies manual on page 15. If you think your project is limited into one or more of these categories, you will need to include a memo with your application to the grants and contracts office which indicates the category number that you think your project falls into, and why. Please include any supporting documentation with your application (e.g. survey forms, etc) to help the categorization process. If you are unsure whether your project is exempt, and would like to discuss the proposal with a member of the IRB staff, please feel free to contact our office. If your project involves SOLELY activities in the Exempt category 4 (study of pre-existing data/specimens with no recording of identifiers/links) and therefore is studying retrospective data ONLY and not any prospective data that will be come into existence later than today, please submit an Infoed application for this project. Please contact the PPHS office with any questions.