Deluged By Grant Applications, Office Steps Up To the Challenge

Published: June 12, 2009

New Haven, Conn. — Teamwork and focus were the watchwords in Yale's Grants and Contracts Administration (GCA) office last month, as a veritable tsunami of grant applications washed through the small office — all in response to the $10 billion National Institutes of Health (NIH) Stimulus Bill.

In total, GCA — which normally handles 100 to 200 grants a month — processed 486 grant applications in just 10 days, totaling over $200 million in requests. These ranged from 8- to 12-page applications for two-year challenge grants to over 100 pages for high-end instrumentation grants.

Teamwork — and some extra hours — helped staff in Yale’s Grants and Contracts Administration office deal with an onslaught of grant applications in response to the National Institutes of Health Stimulus Bill.

"It was the equivalent of doing two months of work in 10 days," says Rita Nigri, associate director of GCA. "Everyone pitched in to make this happen; I have never seen such teamwork and sense of purpose."

Nigri supervises a team of 18 grant reviewers and seven support staff who are responsible for screening and processing all of the sponsored research grants submitted by Yale faculty. When news of the one-time NIH stimulus funding reached her office, she only had a few weeks to prepare for the onslaught.

"We had to reconfigure our work flow, implement job sharing, extend our work hours and set up a help desk to field faculty questions," she says. "It was a great team effort."

Their challenge was compounded by an overwhelmed government grants website which could not process the thousands of grants coming in from research institutions around the country. The GCA team adapted to this temporary roadblock by submitting files from their home computers in the early hours of the day, when the government servers were more accessible.

The productivity of the GCA office was especially gratifying to Andy Rudczynski, associate vice president for research administration, who oversees grants and contracts. "I am extremely pleased to see how well GCA stepped up to this challenge," Rudczynski says. "Their success under these extraordinary circumstances is what we have been moving toward over the past year as we seek to provide improved service to faculty and staff and continue to build and strengthen teams of qualified and knowledgeable individuals."

While the bulk of the NIH stimulus grant awards will not be made until September, Yale is already beginning to receive some awards from the recovery funds. However, there is no respite for the GCA team. The regular two-month cycle of NIH grants will soon be upon them, and the office is hard at work processing the thousands of research agreements, clinical trial applications, sponsored research contracts and grant applications which they are responsible for reviewing for compliance.

— By Robin Hogen

PRESS CONTACT: Robin Hogen 203-432-5423