If five or 10 years have passed since an emeritus faculty member last submitted a research grant application, he or she probably wouldn’t recognize the process today.
Initiated by a move to streamline government during the Clinton administration, and fueled by rapid advances in technology and electronic communications, the way federal-sponsored funding agencies — places such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities — do business with campus research administrators and the faculty they support has changed significantly during the past decade.
And the changes at all levels of sponsored research funding and administration just keep coming. Federal mandates, for instance, call for all federal agencies to have transitioned to an all-electronic submission process by summer 2007. All agencies will also need to have their program announcements available for electronic response via a unified and aptly named website, Grants.gov, by then.
Changes such as these don’t just affect the Washington end of the equation. They also mean that all applications submitted by Binghamton faculty will have to be prepared and submitted electronically, an eventuality for which Binghamton University’s Office of Research Development Services (RDS) has been preparing for years.
“What we tried to do was become part of any type of demo group we could,“ said Lisa Gilroy, director of Research Development Services. “That allowed us to get a head start so we knew the ins and outs and the quirks in the system. That way, when we worked with our faculty, we knew what to expect.“
This year, to make the transition even smoother, Binghamton University is adopting, in cooperation with the other three university centers in the State University of New York system, a system known as Coeus. Developed at MIT and named after the Greek Titan Coeus, god of intelligence and deep, searching questions, the system allows for total online proposal management.
“Say we’re submitting to the NIH,“ Gilroy said. “We go in and tell the system which specific program announcement we’re submitting to. Then it will collect and deliver to us all the necessary forms and information related to that announcement. On their end, faculty can forward things to us, and we can go online and see if their information is complete and ensure that they’ve met the guidelines.“
Coeus also facilitates required institutional electronic reviews, including those by department chairs and deans. Until just months ago, that part of the application process still required walking proposals around campus to obtain administrative reviews and signatures, Gilroy added.
Though Gilroy’s office has gone by several different names since she began working at Binghamton as a grant and contract administrator in 1988, the mission of Research Development Services has remained essentially the same throughout the years. The role of the office is to help faculty identify funding opportunities; assist with proposal preparation, review, negotiate and accept awards; and assist with award administration.
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