ORPA steps up to the growing challenge

By Gunta Liders

Liders

s the Office of Research and Project Administration (ORPA) looks ahead to the coming year, I would like to share with the University community a few items of interest.

The University just completed a successful fiscal year with respect to the growth of sponsored research. Overall, sponsored program expenditures increased by 12 percent with an 18 percent increase at the Medical Center that was marked by an increased volume of National Institutes of Health awards. At the College, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences realized a 12 percent increase in its sponsored research expenditures.

Along with growth has come an increased complexity in the organizational structure that supports our research. For instance, cross-disciplinary centers are joining traditional academic departments as the nucleus of organized research, along with formalized collaborations with other universities and affiliated organizations.

The volume of research subcontracts or "subrecipient agreements" continues to increase. ORPA now issues over 600 subcontract agreements to collaborating institutions each year, compared to just over 200 five years ago. This complexity presents challenges for ORPA and the community, namely maintaining a high level of service, especially during heavy grant deadlines or staff shortages.

The myriad of federal regulations and complexity of applying and submitting proposals to sponsoring agencies adds another layer of challenges to the process. In response, ORPA offers educational opportunities and workshops directed toward compliance and sponsor requirements. We hope, in the coming year, interactive Web technology will make these services accessible to a greater number of researchers and administrators.

With a recent mandate set by recent federal legislation, a single, uniform system for electronically submitting grant applications to federal agencies is on the horizon, and the University is ensuring we will have the capability to take advantage of such a system at the appropriate time.

Through the joint efforts of ORPA and Information Technology Services (ITS), the University has recently become home to a national listserv that helps support a proposal and grants management database system (named Coeus) developed by MIT. ORPA also has created an easy-to-use reporting tool for querying sponsored program activity called UR-Coeus Reporting, available to all divisions of the University via a Web download page. New users can download UR-Coeus Reporting, or existing users can receive updates from this page. For more information contact us at x5-9096 or visit our Web site at www.rochester.edu/orpa/urcoeus.

ORPA is committed to delivering quality service to the University community in keeping with the challenges of growth and complexity. We hope to balance these challenges with tools to help facilitate the research process and to educate the research community of our sponsoring agency requirements and regulations.

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Gunta Liders is director of the Office of Research and Project Administration.

This column is one of an occasional series on administrative issues at the University.

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