Minneapolis VA Health Care System Research Service
Creating or Updating Investigator Profiles
Investigator Profiles
Research Service maintains profiles for all active research investigators. These profiles increase the visibility of our research program, enhance interest in collaborations, and improve our ability to recruit new clinical and research trainees and staff.
Our goal is to ensure your profile does not require constant attention to keep information current. Profiles include links out to your full bibliography, and options to incude links to your profile pages at academic affiliates, internal research centers, and to professional networking platforms commonly used by researchers.
If profile information is not provided, investigator profiles will list only information that is publicly available. For these profiles, information such as academic affiliations, education, research interests, and links to full bibliographies may be incomplete or inaccurate.
Creating or updating your profile
To create or update your profile, we ask you to provide three files, and optionally, a professional photo. Descriptions and purpose of each are below.
- Current NIH Biosketch:
- Your NIH biosketch is used to verify education, positions and title, and should include your preferred link to your full list of publications. We ask for your biosketch because most investigators will already have this file available, and no extra work is thus required on your part.
- Research Topics and Areas of Interest Form:
- This form is used to verify VA-defined research topic areas and MeSH keywords describing your research. We request that our investigators verify this form annually to ensure that our program has an accurate picture of your research interests and experience. For current investigators, your most recently verified form can be provided to you upon request. For new investigators, the form is linked above.
- A note regarding MeSH keywords: We recommend for this that you use MeSH on Demand, which will help you quickly determine relevant MeSH terms. Just paste in a recent abstract or your NIH biosketch personal statement, and matching keywords will be returned.
- Website Profile Form:
- This brief form is used to capture information that is not already included in the NIH biosketch and Research Topics form; specifcially, this form requests your biographical statement, professional networking links, and links to any external sites.
- The four common professional research-focused networking platforms included are ORCID, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Academia.edu. If you use some or all of these sites, please include your profile links. We do not endorse or recommend the use of any individual professional networking site, nor do we expect you to create a new profile on any of these sites specifically for our program. We do include space for you to list any other networking platforms used to promote your research (your professional Twitter account, for example).
- Professional Photo (optional):
- If you would like to include a photo on your profile page, we request that you only submit a professional photo such as your VA or University staff photograph. Photos will be cropped to 3:2 and resized to 300 px tall by 200 px wide; please ensure your image is of high enough resolution to allow this.
- If you do not currently have a VA staff photo and would like to obtain one, you may do so through Medical Media during their open studio hours (second Tuesday of each month, 10-12pm and 2-4pm).
Send all materials (NIH Biosketch, Research Topics and Areas of Interest form, Website Profile form, and professional photo) via email to the Research Office at vhaminresearchoffice@va.gov.
