Welcome
The Office of Sponsored Programs and Research Administration (OSPRA) is a unit under the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) with a dotted line of authority to the Office of Business and Financial Services (OBFS). OSPRA interacts with faculty, students, department business staff, University administration, and external sponsor program officers and award negotiators to provide service and support to the University’s missions of instruction, research, public service, and economic development.
OSPRA is comprised of four divisions: Proposal, Award, Subaward, and UI eRA (Electronic Research Administration).
The Proposal Division is responsible for reviewing and approving the requests for external funding prepared and submitted by the campus community to Federal, State, and Private Sponsors. The Staff reviews proposals for budget accuracy, interprets regulation and proposal guidelines, provides training where necessary, and acts as a liaison with sponsor officials to respond to questions and requests for additional documentation to support award issuance.
The Award Division is responsible for negotiating terms and conditions of awards resulting from the submission of requests for funding and other associated no-dollar agreements. The staff responds to agreements provided by the sponsor and also draft agreements in the absence of sponsor provided documents. The Staff interacts with University Counsel and the Office of Technology Management (OTM) with regard to exceptions to standard language and Intellectual Property.
The Subaward Division is responsible for issuing agreements to lower tier sub-recipients under the prime awards the University receives from external sponsors. The Staff interprets the wide variety of terms and conditions to determine appropriate flowdown language from the prime agreement dependent upon the type of sub-recipient, e.g. institution of higher education, not-for-profit, or commercial concern. They also interact with Counsel and OTM to ensure appropriate exceptions to standard language and Intellectual Property terms have been addressed.
UI eRA is responsible for the implementation and ongoing support of the University’s solution to electronic research administration as mandated in statute by the University’s largest funding source, i.e. Federal agencies. The project is utilizing a phased approach to implementing a software solution to 1) track proposals and awards, and 2) introduce an electronic proposal development and approval routing system. The proposal tracking phase was implemented in the central office on July 1, 2004 and the second phase to implement the proposal development module is currently underway.