“what happens if a student just happens to ask them questions about their work, or a potential collaborator asks for some data to be assembled?”

 

I think this gets at the question of what activities constitute legitimate effort on a grant.  I can remember in the past proposals not requesting travel to a conference during the first year when, presumably, no data worth sharing has yet been generated.  Is that the way most proposals go out these days? 

 

While each funding agency may differ we can go to NSF to look at how they view Broader Impacts:

“Broader impacts may be accomplished through the research itself, through the activities that are directly related to specific research projects, or through activities that are supported by, but are complementary to the project.”  Complementary.

 

Clearly, the current climate change regarding science demands that we walk a fine line between support of projects, support of scientists and support of scientists’ institutions.   But how do we defend the benefit to society that comes from supporting individuals who seek to know new things?  I’d like to think that a grant (unlike a contract) offers a bit of flexibility in how we interpret “related to a project.” 

 

Charlie Hathaway

 

 

 

How are they going to stay funded if they never write proposals?  Keep in mind they can’t even contribute to someone else writing one.  Or what happens if a student just happens to ask them questions about their work, or a potential collaborator asks for some data to be assembled?  I’d think you’d need to pay for at least some of their time from hard sources to prevent some very uncomfortable audit questions.

 

 

 

Dear All,

 

I want to pose a question regarding salaries of research faculty who are entirely soft-funded.

 

I believe that most of us agree that charging 100% of effort to sponsored activities for regular faculty who have duties such as committee work, student advising, proposal writing etc is not allowable. But what about the faculty that just work on their grants? They are those whose FTE is reduced when they don’t have grants that fund their effort. Would you allow charging them just to grants or do you subsidize these appointments with hard money for some small percentage?

 

Thank you for sharing your practices.

 

Zoya

Zoya Davis-Hamilton, Ed.D., CRA / Associate Vice Provost for Research Administration & Development / Office of the Vice Provost for Research / Tufts University /136 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA 02111 / (617) 636-6709 / http://viceprovost.tufts.edu/researchadmin/

 

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