Proposal and Grant Information


Forms

Policies

General

All correspondence and documentation pertaining to grants and contracts must flow through the Administrative Office. All pending grant and contract proposals must be received in the Administrative Office at least 5 full days prior to the submission date for electronic submissions and 10 full days prior to the submission date for paper submissions.

Allowable Costs

The principal investigator must authorize all expenditures of project funds.

Costs are allowable if they meet all four factors:

  1. Reasonable - The cost is necessary for the operation of the institution or the performance of the sponsored agreement. The individuals concerned acted with due prudence. The actions taken with respect to the incurrence of the cost are consistent with established institutional policies and practices applicable to the work of the institution generally, including sponsored agreements.
  2. Allocable - The goods or services involved are chargeable or assignable to such cost objective in accordance with relative benefits received. The cost is incurred solely to advance the work under the sponsored agreement. The cost benefits the sponsored agreement. The cost allocable to a particular sponsored project may not be shifted to other sponsored agreements in order to meet deficiencies caused by overuns or the other reasons of convenience.
  3. Consistently Treated - Like costs must be treated the same in like circumstances, as either direct or pooled (F&A) costs.
  4. Necessary to complete the scope of the project.

Percent Effort

It is expected that Principal Investigators will request and recover the amount of their salaries commensurate with the amount of effort, which they expend, on an individual research project.

Training Grants

Trainee appointments are normally made in 12-month increments. No trainee may be appointed for less than 9 months during the initial period of appointment, except with the prior approval of the NIH awarding unit or when health-professional students are appointed to approved, short-term research training positions.

No individual trainee may receive more than 5 years of aggregate NRSA support at the predoctoral level or 3 years of support at the postdoctoral level, including any combination of support from institutional training grants and individual fellowship awards.

In most cases, travel expenses and training related expenses are provided to each trainee to be used for travel and purchases such as lab supplies, books, etc., as long as the expense benefits the training of the trainee. All expenses against the training grant MUST be approved by the PI AND the mentor of the trainee.

Stipends may be supplemented with non-Federal funds and do not require additional effort from the trainee.

Shared Services

The Department of Microbiology provides research support services for Principal Investigators through a cost-sharing mechanism. These services include in-house technical support, service contracts for shared equipment, maintenance of shared equipment including parts and supplies, dry ice, liquid nitrogen, and biohazard trash disposal.
Shared services are applied to budgets according to budgeted FTEs. Your Grants Manager will include these fees automatically.
Current rates for Shared Services can be provided by the Business Office.

Biosketch Information

Below is the link and instructions for creating, managing and printing your NIH Biosketch from Faculty Affairs and Professional Development website.

PENN FEDS

  • Enter your PennKey and Password and click ‘login’
  • You will be taken to MyDotMed, the School of Medicine’s gateway to applications screen. There will be a white box on the left side of the screen that lists the applications you have access to, click on the line that lists

EXPERTISE – FACULTY EXPERTISE – LAUNCH

  • When you get to your personal FEDS page you will see a series of categories down the left side of the screen and 5 tabbed categories at the top of the screen.You will only need to work in the first 2 tabbed categories (Expertise Data Entry, and Expertise Output)
  • Begin on the Expertise Data Entry tab – the categories on the left side of the screen should begin with ‘cv information, biographical info, contact information,etc.).
  • Each one of these categories can be selected and edited individually. When you select a category, i.e. contact information, you will be taken to a screen that shows the information that is currently in the FEDS database. You might not have any information in the database for some categories. To add or edit the information for that category, click on the button labeled ‘Insert New Record’. You will be taken to a screen that shows fields for the information pertinent to that category. For example, if you are adding or updating contact information, the screen will give fields for contact type, address, phone, etc. Once you have entered the information into the fields, you can hit the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the screen and your information will be updated in the system. The changes that you make will be reflected on your faculty web bio 24 hours later. The information that is featured on your individual faculty page is from the following FEDS categories:
    • Biographical Information
    • Contact Information
    • Education
    • Postgraduate Training
    • Appointments (Penn Faculty Appointments)
    • Publications (10 will be listed on your bio page – instructions on how to select these 10 to follow below)
    • Expertise Statements
  • The Expertise Statements section is open-ended. For the sake of consistency across faculty pages, it is strongly recommended that you include the following subheadings:

Research Interests (1 sentence) Keywords

Research Details (note that images may be inserted-contact the Office of Faculty Affairs for assistance with images)

Rotation Projects Lab Personnel

  • The next tab is the Expertise Output section. When you select this tab you will have different, corresponding categories on the left side of the screen.
  • The first category ‘View/Download CVs’ takes you to a screen that allows you to select files that have been created using the data that you entered into your FEDS database. CVs, Grant Sheets, and etc. will be automatically created for you in the proper format using the data you entered into the system. You can download and print a copy of your updated CV or other file as soon as you have updated the information in the data entry section.
  • In order to select which 10 publications you would like to appear on your faculty web bio pages, you need to select the category “Select Public Publications” on the left side of the screen.
  • This will take you to a screen that will list the 10 publications that currently appear on your faculty web bio (assuming you have entered publications into FEDS). Next to each publication is a drop down box with the numbers1-10.
  • You can set FEDS to automatically display your 10 most current publications. If you choose to do so, click that button. If you would like to manually select the publications, follow the steps below.
  • If you would like to change the publications that appear on your web page, you should click on the link to “Select Alternate Publications’.
  • This will take you to a screen listing all of the publications that you have entered into the FEDS database. You can select any of these (up to 10) to be included on your faculty web bio. You can change the list of public publications as frequently as you would like. Your changes will be reflected on your faculty web bio within 24 hours.