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Collaborative Unit offers research help by Dick Peterson Public Relations Collaboration may be the glue that makes a research project greater than the sum of its parts. And it may be just what's needed to get the project funded.   Biometry and Epidemiology's Dan McGee, Ph.D., is sure of it.   Since his arrival at MUSC in July, he has worked with nearly every department and school in the university through the department's Collaborative Unit. The unit “provides consultation in the areas of statistics, epidemiology, system science, health outcomes evaluation, experimental design, environmental health risk assessment, biomathematics, and computing methodology,” according to the unit's Web site <http://www.biometry.musc.edu/>.   The unit taps the expertise of the Department of Biometry and Epidemiology to serve the university with grant application assistance, data analysis and interpretation, and manuscript preparation and review.   “I would call myself a collaborative researcher,” McGee said. He also calls himself the unit’s “titular head and traffic director.” He said a good bit of his time with the Collaborative Unit is redirecting researchers to the resources they need both within and outside his department.   McGee began his career at NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and has worked with the Framingham Heart Study, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He entered academia at the University of Arizona, conducted research in preventive medicine at Loyola University in Chicago and joined MUSC's Department of Biometry and Epidemiology last July.   Over the years science has moved to where no single discipline can get a study done, McGee said. “Most research requires expertise from several fields that could include everything from biostatistics to medicine to epidemiology and bioinformatics.”   “The Collaborative Unit is always looking for more researchers to collaborate with,” McGee said. “I would like to see it grow to support a few positions dedicated to nothing but collaborative research.”    There is no charge to investigators for consultation on study design or for manuscript preparation, if the manuscript is related to analyses conducted by the unit. Other activities are either charged by the hour (for short term projects), or for projects of six months or more, investigators can support percent efforts of Collaborative Unit staff on their project.    Although still in its infancy, the Collaborative Unit has two masters level students, two graduate students and a recently hired faculty level statistician all funded through grant-related collaborations.