Transcript Senate Meeting
August 23, 2011
Ann Beth Presley, chair: I’d like to call this meeting to order.
I know everybody had a little trouble getting here this afternoon with all the digging up around campus. I am Ann Beth Presley, Chair of the University Senate. This is my first meeting and I’d like to welcome you to the August Senate meeting. I know we have a lot of new senators so I’d like to go over some of the rules of the Senate. First what I would like for everybody to do is sign in which is in the back, normally we enter through that door, but because of construction we didn’t enter that way today, and at the same time pick up a clicker which you will use to vote.
If you would like to speak about an issue, go to the microphone; state your name, whether you are a Senator and the unit you represent. The rules of the Senate require that Senators or substitute Senators be allowed to speak first; after all comments by Senators on an issue, guests are welcome to speak. Our regular parliamentarian, Constance Hendricks, is in Malawi with work so Bill Sauser, who is our chair-elect and has served as parliamentarian before, has volunteered to serve as parliamentarian today, thus he will be a non-voting member at today’s meeting.
Senate membership is 87 Senators. Please turn your clickers on and press A or B, (jokingly, A is for yes B is for no). At this time there are 54 Senators in attendance; a quorum requires 44 senators. A quorum has been established.
The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes from the June meeting. Larry Crowley has posted the minutes and sent a link to all Senators. Are there any additions, changes, or deletions to these minutes? Hearing none, the minutes will stand as approved as written.
I now invite Dr. Gogue to come forward and present his remarks.
Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you and I am delighted to be with you, hope all of you had some time off this summer and that you are back and ready to go. We have a few items of, actually the first time in my 4 years that we got some good news out of Montgomery. Income tax revenues are up 5.6 percent through July, sales tax up 3.6 percent and those feed directly into the ETF, Educational Trust Fund, as long as it increases by 2 percent there won’t be any additional proration in the current year. You may remember last year the governor prorated the budget around September 30. So we don’t ecpect any at least at this point and a reasonably good sign, of course I don’t know what it will look like after the August month, but at least it looked good through July.
Second thing. We had an executive committee meeting of the Senate on Monday and one of the agenda items was a place on campus for faculty to convene. We’ve had several people that had remembered the use of Foy, there was an area within Foy that was used for that purpose. Dr. Large and Dr. Carry have been working in the last couple of days and the area that used to be used has all been re-carpeted, cleaned up, so we are looking at a location there that would be from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. back in Foy at this point. We are looking for some other options for a faculty, I don’t want to call it a faculty club or university club, but a meeting place. We think we are making some progress on that.
Third thing I wanted to mention is that we go to the Board of Trustees in September with a budget for our fiscal year beginning October 1. There are two items I will call your attention to, 1. There is a 3 percent base increase for merit-based pay that’s been added and is our recommendation. We assume the trustees will look at that carefully, then also and option for a 2 percent on average one-time increase, like we did last year in December. So those are the two items that affect the budget.
Forth area I want to mention is during the summer I received a note that talked about the smoking on campus. Remember there was a proposal that went through Student Government to employee classes and the faculty senate. All those came back in terms of positive votes to ban, eliminate, or change the policies relative to smoking on campus. I’ve also heard very strong comments from those who don’t like that. You need to know what we’ve asked to do as for the Provost and for Don Large along with Dr. Carry; form a small group of people with strong views pro and con and to make recommendations to us this fall term. Any changes that would be made would be announced in January. So that’s sort of the time frame to try to look at that.
The votes were, probably on the student side was about 90% for a cessation of smoking, 10% opposed. In the employees classes it was more mixed, about 60% in favor and 40% in opposition. Those are the numbers we’re looking at, a lot of times you just look at the majority vote but I think you have to also look and consider the voices of others. So we are going to spend a little time looking at that in more detail.
Let me give you a heads up on the Dean of Engineering. Dr. Benefield has announced that he will be retiring, stepping down, at the end of the academic year, so we are in process of trying to put a search committee together. My view has always been that Provost’s make the decision on Deans. Since we have an Interim Provost, I am going to ask the Interim Provost to chair the committee and in this case I will be the selecting official. I won’t be involved in the search until they get through. Could be that we have a new Provost, but at the very same time it would be a very new Provost, so we didn’t want to leave it where an Interim Provost is making a decision for a Dean and maybe they not feel good about that, Tim, you know somebody that’s only there for a while. So we are doing that.
I understand that on the Provost search the committee is interviewing folks as we speak, over the last day or two, and the goal will be to bring those candidates to campus in September.
Final thing I’ll mention is the trustee selection committee, remember that is two members of the Board of Trustees, two members of the Alumni Association, and the governor; they are meeting on August 30 in the auditorium of the State Capitol Building to carry on the next phase of 170 plus candidates that applied for those positions. I’d be happy to respond to any questions that you may have. (pause) Thank you. [8:15]
Ann Beth Presley, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.
I’d like to welcome everybody to the first meeting of the 2011-2012 year. It is also my first meeting as Chair. I would like to introduce the Senate Officers. I’m the chair, Claire Crutchley, who could not be here today, is the Immediate Past Chair, she has been extremely helpful since I took over in July and I know will continue to be. Larry Crowley is the Secretary who does all the minutes and an incredible job of organization. The Chair-Elect is Bill Sauser (helping out and doing double duty as Parliamentarian) and the Secretary Elect is Robin Jaffe. All of the officers are excellent to work with and it has been a pleasure and a great experience working with this group of faculty as it was last year as chair-elect. All of us welcome your feedback about any issue and will try and answer your questions as best we can. If you have a concern and an initiative you’d like to see, please bring it to us and we can channel it to the appropriate committee to be considered. I am also very happy that Constance Hendrix has agreed to be our Parliamentarian—she is in Malawi with work, as I mentioned, today but will be here for the rest of the meetings and is a great resource. I, especially, want to mention and thank Laura Kloberg who is the Senate and Ombudsperson’s administrative assistant and she has been a fantastic resource for us and takes care of all of our web issues.
I also want to welcome our new Senators. There may be a little confusion because we tend to enter through the back where the sign up sheets are and where you pick up your clickers. One third of our unit representatives are new Senators, we also have new deans on the Senate and new Steering committee members. I would also like to welcome back our mid-term Senators. All Senators, whether ex-officio or not have a vote and should attend every Senate meeting. Make sure that you sign in and pick up a clicker so that you can vote. If you cannot attend, please send a substitute in your place that will have full voting rights.
Last year was an extremely busy year for the Senate and this year also promises to have a full agenda. We started Stage 1 of revising the Faculty Handbook with help of outside consultant Dr. Bill Rickerts and the Faculty Handbook Committee is getting ready to move on to Stage two of revision of the Handbook where they will add important existing AU policies related to the faculty, that for some reason, are not presently included in the Handbook. The Rules Committee, as chaired by Larry Crowley, has worked extremely hard at staffing the Senate and University committees and has done so in, what I believe, is record time. We will be voting on a small number of committees in a few minutes. The Steering committee is starting to review committee reports to prepare for the year and has been preparing for this meeting. Many other committees have been hard at work over the summer and we hope to hear reports from them this year and we thank them for their hard work.
One announcement about voting, particularly for those new senators, the senate will continue to use clickers in its voting process. When you vote, please look at the clicker and make sure it has a light indicating that it is on, as the clickers will turn themselves off after a length of time. If the light is off, please turn it back on. Once you vote, your clicker should either show a green light: this means your vote has been cast. If there is a red light, vote again—your vote will only count once. We’ve already done a trial vote, so I am not worried about that.
Today we have two action items and two information items. Our first action item will be presented by Larry Crowley, Secretary of the Senate. [12:47]
Larry Crowley, Secretary: Welcome. This is from the Rules Committee, additional nominations that were not available to us in the June meeting. Cox from Veterinary Medicine, Scott Ketring from Human Sciences. We are also going to bring some additional names, we have people that have retired and people that have moved departments that we are going to have to come back to you probably in the next meeting in terms of fully staffing the committees with the people that represent the departments. This recommendation comes from the Rules committee, it does not require a second.
Ann Beth Presley, chair: At this time I’d like to open the floor for discussion. Are there any comments or questions. Seeing none we will vote at this time.
Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B. A=54, B=0 The nominations carry.
The second action item will be presented by Larry Crowley, Secretary of the Senate.
Larry Crowley, secretary: This is dealing with the University Committees. What the Rules committee has struggled with is the established policy where we have to provide additional members for nomination for the president to select. And what we would like to introduce is rather than having additional faculty representatives who would not actually be appointed that the Rules committee would be allowed to go down to nominating the number of openings and if the President would like to come back and seek additional nominations that that would be a follow-up procedure. This is also a motion from Rules and therefore doesn’t require a second.
Ann Beth Presley, chair: Are there any questions?
Bob Locy, senator biological sciences: Did I understand for you to say, Larry, that the intention of this amendment is that you will now nominate exactly the number of openings on a committee and no more than that?
Ann Beth Presley, chair: Yes for the University Committees, the exact number, but the president still has the ability to veto if he doesn’t want the nominee(s), and then we will come back and fill it.
Bob Locy, senator biological sciences: With the context of this language change that’s proposed… because that is not clear from the language change that’s proposed.
Larry Crowley, secretary: Yes, what happens is in the language of this article, this comes out of the middle of it. In terms of nominations of the Rules committee for University Committees this would be the number that would be nominated. The president, down here at the bottom in existing policy, would be able to select from that or actually go back and ask for additional nominations. So the instructions that we would like to have from the Senate is we would be able to nominate only the number of openings. One of the challenges that we have, Bob, is when we have specific membership requirements of a particular department, finding two people that are willing to volunteer to have one actually turned back or turned away is a big effort. And we thought this was going to be a more efficient way of actually getting people involved in University Committees.
Bob Locy, senator biological sciences: Thank you. [17:49]
Ann Beth Presley, chair: Any more discussion? A call for a vote then. A=53, B=5. The motion passes.
That was end of our action items. So you can turn off your clickers if you choose. We have two information items. The first information item is about Auburn Research Week and will be presented by Paula Bobrowski, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, College of Liberal Arts.
Paula Bobrowski, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, College of Liberal Arts: Thank you for inviting us here this afternoon. I want to introduce our executive team that’s come with me because in case you have questions, I want to just say there has been a very large team across the university working on this project for quite some time. Martha Taylor from the Office of the Vice President for Research, George Flowers is representing Graduate Programs, Skip Bartol and Graham Wolkaby have been working very hard on the faculty development and faculty forum research week 2012.
What we’re here for today is first of all, we have the blessing of President Gogue and this effort is coming out of the Office of the Vice President for Research and the purpose is to bring a lot of presense and honor to the academic mission of research. And when we talk about research, we’re talking about it in a very broad perspective; it’s really creative and scholarly activity across the university. This is the first time that Auburn’s ventured into a program of this caliber and what we’ve done this first inaugural research week event is to bring together many things that have been taking place more or less in isolation across the campus.
The dates are set. The event mainly will be held over at the Conference Center for 3 days starting April 2 through April 5 with the day of the fifth being a partnership with the Museum and they have programming that centers around arts and research at the Museum on that last day.
Just to start, on Monday. I’m going to run through briefly, the schedule of the events that are going to happen. We are having a Web site that’s being developed right now that will be online so as the program develops, and we now have the structure in place, as the programs get developed all this information will be available through the Web site for anyone who is interested.
We will have a registration and we’re asking faculty and students and so forth to preregister so that as we get into the programming, if it looks like there’s a big audience for a particular presentation we can switch rooms and so forth. We basically have the Conference Center for those days. The Office of the Vice President for Research are looking at having sponsors with exhibits throughout the hallways in the Conference Center. People that are very interested are connected with research, so there is a committee that is also working on that.
The morning of the 2nd we will start off with a kick-off event and my understanding is that Dr. Gogue will be there to help with the kick-off, we will have keynote speaker, Dr. Mason and so forth. Then we start the morning with the Undergraduate Research Forum. Loraine Wolfe unfortunately cannot be with us today, but the Undergraduate Research Forum has been going on for several years around campus and that’s going to come into this event. So we are asking faculty to really think about getting their students involved across campus and submitting papers and being part of the Undergraduate Research Forum. The plan, also from Loraine, and I’m sorry she cannot be here to speak to this, but her plan is to debut the first ever Undergraduate Research Journal. She’s hoping that will be ready to debut at this event, which is a big endeavor that she’s been working on. [24:07]
There will be undergraduate and graduate research poster sessions going on, they will be a lot of cross fertilization at this type of event between undergraduate and graduate students and faculty, so we can start appreciating each other’s work and also highlighting and getting people interested in things that they may know nothing about. Especially when we start looking at undergraduates that are thinking about graduate programs at Auburn. I think this is a real huge plus.
That afternoon the graduate research symposium will be in place and in a few minutes I’m going to let George Flowers overview in a little more detail what that is. Then that evening there will be a network reception. One of the highlights that evening is thanks to the Provost, Tim Boosinger, and Constance Relihan we are bringing in Tracy Kidder for Auburn Connects. That will be held over in the Arena and we’re hoping that whole day will be a huge involvement of the campus. One of the things we are asking faculty is to incorporate this week into you syllabi as much as possible, so both faculty and students can participate in these events.
On the second day will be the Faculty Research Forum and Graham and Skip will talk about that in a few more minutes to give you more detail on that. A faculty poster session will be included in that also. That afternoon, Martha is putting together a first rate grantsmanship workshops for faculty and graduate students and she can tell you a little more about that. The evening will conclude with a research awards and gala big event dinner which will be by invitation for people who have participated and so forth.
Wednesday continues on with very detailed and many grantsmanship workshops and seminars that day. On Thursday the Museum is very excited to partner with us and they will be having events at the Museum related to research. I also want to mention that the Library is going to be involved in this and they will be hosting exhibits and there will be more information. I want to thank Bonnie MacEwan for donating space and working with us with some of the colleges to make that space available.
Let me have George come up and give a brief overview of the Research Forum.
George Flowers: The graduate research symposium will follow the pattern very similar to what we’ve had for the last couple of years. There will be a Graduate Research Forum, which is the big event which will be held in the Student Center earlier about a month prior to this event. That will be open to graduate students from across campus, so we expect as usual to be widely participated in.
The winners, the best papers, the best posters from that Forum will then be selected to participate in the Research Week Graduate Research Symposium. We will also have a series of poster presentations that will be part of the undergraduate Forum at noon. [28:18] We will continue to have presentations and posters and the humanities and the social sciences the natural sciences and engineering in the same fashion as we’ve had before. And we’ll continue to have the need for faculty judges. In some areas there has been a shortage of faculty judges, so let me take this opportunity to put in an urge for you to participate in the events as faculty judges. It’s very, very important both in the Forum, that’s the earlier event and then in the symposium. Are there any questions about the graduate part of the event? Thank you.
Paula Bobrowski: Skip and Graham do you want to come up and talk a little bit about the faculty research forum?
Graham Wolkaby: Skip deserves most of the credit for this, but in terms of the verbal presentations, oral presentations and the posters, there will be a call for abstracts that will go out in December. There is a downloadable form that will be on the Web site for the Research Week, and so you type into that. There will be a number of categories that you will want to submit to, I know you won’t remember these, but I’ll read them out quickly to give you and idea of the breadth; arts, architecture, design, engineering, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, and interdisciplinary. Pick one of those and you go with your abstract. There will be a reminder in January about those abstracts and the abstract deadline will be February 1. So we will be picking judges to serve in those sessions as well. If anybody is interested in being a judge in one of those categories please contact either Skip or myself.
That’s about where we stand. Skip do you have anything? [30:21]
Paula Bobrowski: Martha do you want to talk a little bit about the grantsmanship workshops you are developing?
Martha Taylor, Office of OVPR: Good afternoon. I’m kind of excited about this because as long as I’ve been at Auburn we’ve never actually done anything quite this coordinated. What we’ve done is for the afternoon on the 3rd we are going to bring in an outside company or an outside organization to help with a grantsmanship workshop, mostly for new faculty. Because of the cost and because of the hands-on context of the workshop it will be open to just a limited number of about 30 people. But then we are also going to have a similar workshop for that half-day that will be available for graduate students.
We did this last year and we filled up the Student Center Ballroom to overflowin, and we hope it was the grantsmanship discussion not the free pizza, but we’ll take what we can get. So we are going to do that again this year and we also want to have a half-day workshop for faculty that are further along in their career in a more research or scholarly program it might be engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations within the campus or with other universities that would like some guidance on large consortium proposals and things like that. We’d like to have that led by a group of faculty members that have been successful in that area. In addition to those 3 kind of major workshops, the outside firm…, that workshop will be a day and a half so it will be intensive the other ones will be shorter. I’ve come up with about just off the top of my head in talking with other people on this committee and then within my office, I’ve come up with about 33 or 34 different topical kinds of things we could talk about. Because of all the space that we have available to us at the Student Center and at the Conference Center we’ve got room for about 91 45-minute sessions. We’d like to offer each one of the ones that we have on the list twice so that faculty or participants, undergraduate or graduate students who come to the symposium will have an opportunity to attend as many of them as they want and we don’t want to have them run into a conflict where they might want to be in two places at once.
So I’ve got a whole host of things that I’ve thought about, but as some of you know I kind of live in a different world, for a lot of you all this might be like watching paint dry. I would really be interested if you have some specific topics that you think would be beneficial that faculty would enjoy hearing about and you know that we can actually teach or know of somebody that can teach it, I am open to suggestions for additional sessions, because we do have the space and we do have the time slots. Right now I have some very broad categories for proposal writing and submission, various post award compliance areas, either financial or administrative or technical, some things associated with funding opportunities and working with development officers and finding alternative sources of funding for various programs. Some sessions associated with various institutional support offices or organizations like using the Library or working with Procurement and Payment Services. Some various agency updates, we’re going to try to get a few people from the Federal Government to come down and provide some assistance in that regard, but with the budget being like it is, their travel has been curtailed somewhat.
Then we’ve got research security and export control and then I threw in a category for things I thought might be of interest, but wasn’t quite sure where to put them. So over the next few months we’ll be putting the final touches on this because we want people to be able to identify early which sessions they would be interested in so we make sure we have enough space for everyone. But if you have some suggestions please feel free to let me know.
Paula Bobrowski: One other thing I want to mention, and then I will take any questions is I don’t know if you are aware of the Auburn Speaks book, but there is a new publication that is beautiful that highlights research around campus. It’s going to be an annual edition. The first edition is on research that faculty across the university are doing on the oil spill and my understanding is that is will also debut at Research Week 2012. So we are really excited. There are a lot of exciting things going on and the success of this is really due to all faculty, all students, administration, everybody embracing it and getting involved. We just ask you to please spread the word and participate. Any questions? You guys are a quiet group. Thank you so much for having us.
Ann Beth Presley, chair: Thanks so much Paula.
The Second Information Item is about the Intramural Grants Program and will be presented by Bruce Smith, Immediate Past Chair of the Faculty Research Committee. Bruce—
Bruce Smith, Immediate Past Chair of the Faculty Research Committee: What I wanted to do today was to take a few minutes of your time and bring you up to speed on this years iteration of the IGP or Intramural Grants Program. This was launched last year as a great example of shared governance in that the Office of the Vice President for Research came to the Faculty Research committee and said we want to do something different, we want to do something with leverage, we want to do something that’s really going to benefit the faculty and we don’t want to keep doing what we’ve been doing in terms of grants coming out of the OVPR, what would you guys like?. [36:52]
So the Faculty Research Committee came up with a set of ideas of what a good research grants program out of central administration would look like and we went back and forth with the Vice President of Research a number of times to create a program. Last year was the first iteration of that. Last year’s program at least in terms of the funding amounts was an unqualified success. All I believe 62 proposals were funded that were submitted, so that’s a 100% funding rate. So if you are thinking about submitting a proposal this year, you want to think about that.
To give you an idea of the amount of money that’s gone out in previous years , in no previous year did the total of all grants programs from the Office of the Vice President for Research exceed $300,000. Last year’s program, counting the match from departments and colleges, so there is a little bit of extra money in there was in excess of 3 million dollars, so that’s a ten-fold increase in funding of faculty research efforts with this new program.
This year because of the financial realities we expect that the funding effort will be slightly lower and the competition for grants will be slightly higher, but hopefully the total will exceed 2 million dollars this year. Obviously the goal here is to leverage this Auburn money into extramural funding through additional grants and those monies that come in. So hopefully with successive individuals within this program we’ll see those in direct costs, those kind of funds grow and be able to continue to support this kind of funding level for a number of years to come so that we can build this programming. That’s kind of the goal to let you know about that.
As with last year’s program there are 4 levels of grants. Only the very first level is that classic independent investigator grant. That’s a small seed project, $2,000, from the OVPR with matching funding from the department. All of these require matching funding that is one of the issues here is it requires department and college buy-in for the investigator to be funded. So there has to be a matching fund.
Level 2 is a little bit higher level and starts to look at this idea of interdisciplinary work and trying to put together teams that can work on projects. Level 2 is again exploratory project, not great big project, but still a reasonable amount of money to get some work done. Level 3 and 4 are the really big projects, they require multiple college involvement and buy-in from multiple different groups around the campus and have to benefit those multiple groups. However you can see that the dollar figures here are quite significant. These are not little tiny grants. So if you do want to look at those kind of dollar figures, you need to put together a team that is working across college boundaries. [40:05] That’s really the goal here.
Level 3 is sort of that classic research proposal and level 4 is an equipment grant. A number of those equipment grants were quite successful last year and are building research infrastructure around the university. I want to urge you to urge your faculty to think about these larger grants and to put together these kinds of collaborative teams, because this is really where we are headed in terms of the research effort at this university. To try an understand how to put some of the diverse backgrounds together in a team that will be more successful than individuals trying to stand on their own.
As I said there are these earlier levels that will help you start to develop that, but also consider these higher levels of funding.
This program is designed to include all colleges, so this is not just someone in the chemistry laboratory with test tubes or biology laboratory or physics or engineering laboratory, buts it’s designed to encourage scholarship across the breadth of this university. So whatever your field of endeavor is do not consider yourself not eligible for this program. please think about ways in which you can apply for this funding.
Forgot to mention it. Levels 1 and 2 by the way the application is very simple. It requires about 250 words. So it’s very, very short, very straight forward. Level 3 and 4 require a little bit more involved application, you need to think a little bit more about it, but for the first 2 levels the application is extremely simple and that was a goal of ours.
Levels 2 through 4 we were talking about this interdisciplinary work, the Review committee is going to be looking for programs that emphasize the targeted areas within Auburn University and I have a list of them here and I’ll show you more on the next slide, but certainly health sciences, food safety, energy and the environment, transportation, advanced science innovation and commerce, and STEM are areas that the University is focusing on. That’s not to say that if you are outside these areas you are unfundable. So please don’t take this as a mandate that you have to be within these areas to be funded by the program, but also recognize that if you are or you can tailor your proposal to these areas you might do better. So it might be wise to think about ways you can look at participating in these initiatives.
A little bit different view of these initiatives, to give you an idea of the range of initiatives that the university is talking about; we have engineering and the environment, transportation, STEM as I mentioned, advanced science innovation and commerce, labortories, food system initiatives which includes food safety, the Auburn Research and Technology Foundation, health science initiative, certainly have the large MRI facility, about to get out 7 tessla magenet in November and that will be open for business early next year. Great collaborative potential there for some research perhaps. Farm and development and some ways we my be able to tie this into our Huntsville group as well, so consider this group of ideas as well when you are thinking about proposals.
The nitty gritty applications are due September 30, so still a month to put this together. As I said level o 1 and 2 are really easy, about 250 words you have to put down. It is definitely important that you if you are thinking about applying for these grants that you go to your department head and dean immediately and start talking about the matching funds because that’s always been the critical problem in putting together these proposals.
Last year we had lots of faculty throw their hands up and say, we’re never going to be able to get matching funds and not even ask. And lots of deans says that they were not even being talked to about this. So please talk to your department head and your dean and get with them to talk about what you might be able to put together as a package for the matching funds that are required for this. I encourage you to do that because I think that the deans have been very creative about identifying funding sources and have been very enthusiastic about supporting this program. So don’t think of the matching funds as an obstacle to applying to this program.
Support would begin on or after February 1 of next year, so that’s a relatively quick turn around time. Finally, last year there were some questions about what the definitions of principle investigator, c0-principle investigator, and co-investigator were. Dr. Pinkert came to the FRC and we provided a set of definitions. Please use those definitions for this grant process. A PI is a person who is in charge of the entire grant. If you wish to name co-PI, that would be co-principle investigator, each of those individuals has to have an administrative role in the grant, not just a research role. And you have to create an administrative plan or a power sharing plan for those co-PIs, is a requirement. If an individual is a faculty member who is simply involved in the science of the grant and providing a portion of the work that’s a perfect time to call them a co-PI. Understand not all granting agencies use those definitions. These definitions only apply to the Intramural Grants Program and not to any other submissions through sponsored programs. We are not setting a definition for Auburn Unversity that you must use for all grants, this is simply for this program. So I want to reassure those of you that use different definitions you are free to continue to do that, but use the definitions for the program.
This is important because co-PIs and PIs are only allowed to apply for one grant. Co-investigators and collaborators can be present on additional grants. But you want to be judicious in the way you assign roles on your grants. I think that’s it, any questions?
Again I encourage you to encourage all of your faculty to apply. As I said 100% funding rate last year is very encouraging and we won’t have that this year but this is an excellent way to get the ball rolling for research in your departments. Thank you very much.
Ann Beth Presley, chair: Thanks Bruce.
That was the last item on the agenda. Does anybody have any unfinished business? New business? No, then you got lucky today and we are adjourned. Be sure to return the clickers on your way out. Thank you. [47:15]