LevelUP Case Study: Pre-Award Administration at the University of Pennsylvania
In a series of articles we will feature case studies submitted to earn the Level III badge for LevelUP. Read this month’s full case study here.
I chose to take a deeper look at pre-award administration as it is handled at my home institution. The University of Pennsylvania is a massive bureaucracy that can make research administration challenging when you are still learning about your role within the institution. Currently, I am enrolled in a training academy with a peer cohort to learn all things research administration at Penn, including the pre-award steps that my senior colleagues have generously described at length. We spend hours together reviewing internal policies, developing mock proposals, and estimating preliminary budgets, knowing the training has niche inclinations to clinical research frameworks. This training academy in combination with SRAI LevelUP modules provides extensive background knowledge that has helped me conceptualize the bigger picture of sponsored research.
Most interestingly, the training academy has outlined sponsored research at Penn using principles of project management. I can see my transferrable skills to pre-award duties through this lens, despite coming from a fundraising background where procedures often diverged from those of grants. We outline stakeholders, budgets, and delegation from the research administrator’s perspective, which I had become familiar with through LevelUP. My takeaway from the LevelUP pre-award module usefully emphasizes the differences between government and industry sponsors and where compliance issues occur most often. As the training academy adds Penn policies to our knowledge base, I can better recognize the vulnerabilities of a research project in the submission phase.
Read the full case study here.
Click here to learn more about SRAI’s LevelUP Micro-credentialing Program.
Authored by Darragh Nolan, Grants Coordinator, Special Operations Unit
University of Pennsylvania
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#June2023
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