Search

The Grants and Contracts Office strives to provide effective and efficient support services throughout the life of all sponsored projects.

Our services include:

  • Pre-Award Services: proposal and budget development support to faculty and graduate students to identify, develop, and submit external grant and contract applications, and internal funding opportunities.

  • Post-Award Services: set up accounts, monitor expenses made to the accounts, provide performance reporting, subcontract invoicing, and account closeouts.

  • Funding Opportunities: provide weekly funding announcements to the College of Education community.
     

GRANT WRITING RESOURCES


PRE AND POST FUNDING ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION

 

OTHER USEFUL LINKS & DOCUMENTS

 

Frequently Asked Questions

A course release is charged to a grant budget at 15% of one’s annual salary which is equivalent to 1.35 months of a 9-month/36-week appointment.

EXAMPLE: Cost of Course Release = $90,000 [Annual Salary] x .15 [15%] = $13,500

Supplemental I salary is derived from the weeks when the faculty member is off contract and cannot exceed their weekly salary/effort. For example, faculty members on 36-week appointments are eligible for up to 12 additional weeks of supplementary I funding making their total weeks of compensation 48 weeks. Total compensation cannot exceed 48 weeks. The supplemental salary for each additional week is determined by the employee’s weekly salary of their annual contract.

Subcontractors:

  • are responsible for programmatic decision making
  • must adhere to federal program compliance requirements
  • use federal funds to carry out a program of the recipient organization

Vendors:

  • operate in a competitive environment
  • provide goods and services within normal business operations (only ancillary [subsidiary] to the federal program)
  • provide similar goods and services to many different purchasers
  • are not subject to the compliance requirements of the federal program

 

RAG22 Guidelines for Participant Support Costs

Participant
An individual who is receiving a service or training opportunity from a workshop, conference, seminar, symposium or other short-term instructional or information sharing activity funded by a sponsored award. A participant may be a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or foreign national. The participant must have a Social Security Number or an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).

Who may be a participant?

  • Post-doctorates and graduate assistants serve in a dual role at the University. These individuals are eligible to be participants unless they have a role in organizing the event or forwarding the project’s aims and are receiving compensation directly or indirectly from the grant.
  • Student wage employees, including graduate assistants receiving bridge funding over the summer through wage or Fixed-Term 2 appointments, are participants only if they are strictly attending the workshop for training purposes.
  • The determination of participant status relates to their primary role – student or employee/graduate assistant. For a project where post-doctorates or graduate assistants or wage payroll students of the University are helping to manage the logistical/administrative details of a sponsored conference or training project, such work would be considered part of their appointment duties and therefore their time and/or travel expenses should be paid for by another appropriate funding source. They should not receive participant support funds on top of that. Conversely, if a post-doctorate, graduate assistant or student wage employee is attending a conference specifically to receive training, those costs generally may be included as participant support costs.

Who may not be a participant?

  • Penn State faculty or staff members.
  • A student or project staff member receiving compensation directly or indirectly from the grant.
  • Professional or keynote presenters whose only role in attending is as a presenter.
  • NOTE: Individuals attending a conference who may also present a session on their research findings as a secondary role could still be considered participants if appropriately documented.
  • Research subjects receiving incentive payments to participate in studies are not participants for this policy.

RP03 The Use of Human Participants in Research

Human participant” or "Human subject" under the FDA regulations means an individual who is or becomes a subject in research, either as a recipient of a test article or as a control. For medical device studies in which data will be submitted to the FDA or held for inspection by the FDA, a human participant includes a human on whose specimen an investigational device is used.

 

  • Data Management - This support through PSU Libraries includes assistance with creating and implementing data management plans, reviewing data management plans before proposal submission, employing best practices for managing data (file naming and folder organization, metadata and data documentation to make data “FAIR”, etc.), selecting a data repository, preparing data for sharing and preservation, depositing data in ScholarSphere, and data curation for deposits to ScholarSphere. You may also contact [email protected]
  • Facilities, Equipment, and Resources This section of a proposal is used to assess the adequacy of the resources available to perform the effort proposed to satisfy both the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts review criteria. Proposers should describe only those resources that are directly applicable. Proposers should include an aggregated description of the internal and external resources (both physical and personnel) that the organization and its collaborators will provide to the project, should it be funded.  Please contact the College Research Office @ [email protected] or (814) 865-0596 for a template.

Repository Services

  • ScholarSphere Penn State's institutional repository. Collects the scholarly output, including data sets, produced by Penn State researchers (faculty, students, and staff), preserving research for ongoing access.
  • DataCommons Disciplinary data repository at Penn State to which researchers may submit data for dissemination and compliance purposes.
  • re3data.org Index of data repositories you can search to see if there's an appropriate disciplinary repository for your research data.