Office of

Grant and Research Development

12-August-2002 meeting - items discussed:

  1. OGRD News:
    • I introduced Jennifer Jansen, Grant/Contract Coordinator. Jennifer will start off approving budgets, reviewing proposals, and completing the award reviews for NSF, USDA, NIH, and other grant awards. Her e-mail address jjansen@wsu.edu
    • I shared that I am completing the job description on hiring a Contracting Officer that will be responsible for negotiating contracts, confidentiality agreements, and material transfer agreements. This will help increase efficiency for the grants and other agreements that require no negotiation which will be handled by the Coordinators.
    • I showed the amount of expenditures for WSU in FY02 per Vince Hutnak's reports on the SPS webpage. That number is $104,512,786, up from last years $92,057,452. A 13.5% increase - outstanding. The increase the year before that was 6.7% and before that 11.3%. Our faculty are keeping very busy!!
    • We discussed the estimated fringe benefit rate of 27% and how it is originated. We also discussed the used of an "actual/estimate" based on the individuals actual salary vs. the estimated salary of $3,400/month. OGRD will continue to use 27% as an estimate but will keep in touch with the Budget office on a regular basis to monitor this rate.
    • I provide an update as to where OGRD is in the development of a new database. A demo version can be found at http://demo.ogrd.wsu.edu click on SEARCH and type in 100000 as a project number and you can see some of the information that we are collecting. You can see that OGRD now will only have one OGRD number per project and ACTIVITY numbers will increase with additional funds and substantive changes to the project.
    • The update on the database also allowed us to explain how this database will be very useful in the account set-up process by providing an account set-up web-page that can be used by OGRD to facilitate work with SPS on the set-up of accounts.
    • I gave a status of completing the data "cleanup" and corrections after migrating the old data into the new database. We have a great deal of current information but historical information needs to be re-created and we are in the process of completing that. We are almost done with the award information for FY02 and once that is complete we will try and get all our recent information all current.

  2. Other News:
    • There are a great deal of issues related to Select Agents (infectious toxins in plants, animals, and humans that can be used for Bio-terrorism) that we are managing. USDA, DHHS, FBI, EH&S, Bio-safety committee, etc. are involved. OGRD manages the Bio-safety committee.
    • The National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) is sponsoring a video-conference that is well worth attending. OGRD will coordinate this activity as we have done in the past. The title is "What Departmental Administrators Need to Know About Post-Award and Cost Analysis".
    • OGRD again will be having an "OGRD Seminar Series". These seminars will focus on outreach to faculty. Sessions topics include 1. How to be funded by NSF/NSF FastLane, 2. PI Roles and Responsibilities, 3. F&A Discussions
    • New Faculty orientation dates are set. Oct. 1st and 2nd.

  3. Our next meeting is scheduled for September 9th.

Dan Nordquist
Director
OGRD
Contact us: ogrd@wsu.edu Phone: 509-335-9661 FAX: 509-335-1676 Accessibility | Copyright | Policies
Office of Grant and Research Development P.O. Box 643140
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164-3140 USA