Office of Sponsored Programs Administration

 

This edition of SR-PD’s News Bulletin summarizes our recent activities and ongoing outreach efforts, along with updates on important sponsor and regulatory policy highlights.

RU Submission/Award Stats
Between January and June of 2015, 140 competitive grant applications were submitted through SR-PD, 89 to federal sponsors, 6 to foreign sponsors, and 45 to private sponsors (24% Collaborative/Multi-PI, 28% Single PI, 37% Career/Fellowships and 11% Other). These figures exclude all progress reports, non-competitive renewals, administrative supplements and data access requests. The University received 45 new and competing awards during this period, 24 from public and 21 from private sponsors (30% Collaborative/Multi-PI, 35% Single PI, and 35% Career/Fellowships).

Sponsor/Policy News
We are staying abreast of developments in Uniform Guidance (UG) on administrative requirements for federal awards (details at Uniform Guidance - Information and Updates), which took effect for new awards and increments to existing awards made on or after December 26, 2014. The NIH has released a new Grants Policy Statement to align NIH policies with the UG.

There have been several policy changes for NIH applications submitted in 2015, including implementation of the new five page NIH Biosketch, and the new NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy, which requires genomic data sharing plans for studies that will generate large-scale genomic data.

We are also closely monitoring the impact of the new National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) guidelines for funding investigators with substantial unrestricted research support, which will be effective for applications submitted on or after January 2, 2016. This new NIGMS policy will work in conjunction with their existing funding policies.

We have been eager to see how the new NIH resubmission policy affected submission numbers. The May issue of the NIH Center for Scientific Review’s Peer Review Notes reported an initial 15% surge of incoming applications since the policy change in April 2014, but submissions have since stabilized for the 2015 review cycle.

Updates on SR-PD Resources
Our 18th ResAdmin Forum was held in April, where we presented updates on recent policy changes, e.g. Uniform Guidance (UG), large scale genomic data sharing, and the five page NIH biosketch, as well as providing an overview of common pitfalls of the Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) and reviewing subaward documentation required by our office in order to comply with the UG.

During the spring, the Tri-Institutional Collaboration Network (TCN) offered presentations on The World of Private Foundations in March, Department of Defense (DOD) Biomedical Research Funding in April and Drug Discovery and Development Challenges in May.  Please check the TCN calendar for our upcoming fall events, including NIH Career Development & Training Award Workshops on September 18th, and A Conversation with Dr. Laurie Glimcher (WCMC Dean) on October 9th.

 

In March we performed an upgrade of our InfoEd (RU's online proposal/award management system) servers to enable us to keep up with electronic research administration (eRA) enhancements. With the support of InfoEd and RU-IT, an upgrade to the latest InfoEd software will take place early in the Fall. SR-PD is working to ensure that our environment is ready for and compliant with all new sponsor requirements.

Have a healthy and productive summer!

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