Sponsored programs office

A university's sponsored programs office is the unit that submits proposals and accepts awards on the university's behalf, negotiates the terms of research funding, and manages the money once it arrives.

How it works in a university-industry collaboration

The names vary: office of sponsored programs, sponsored projects, research administration, or grants and contracts. Pre-award staff check the budget, the compliance items, and the proposal before it goes out. The office holds the authorized organization representative, which NIH also calls the signing official, the person "authorized to act for the applicant" and to take on the award's obligations (NIH Grants Policy Statement 1.2). Post-award staff, sometimes in a separate office, handle invoicing, subawards, reporting, and closeout.

It isn't the tech transfer office, which manages inventions, patents, and licenses. On a company-funded project the two often work together, with sponsored programs negotiating the research agreement and tech transfer handling the IP terms. On an SBIR or STTR, the university's side of the subaward, and often the allocation of rights agreement, goes through one of them, so bring them in early.

Translation Box: sponsored programs

On the academic side: the office between the PI and every funder, and the only one that can commit the university.

On the industry side: the university's contracts counterpart. A PI can agree to the science, but can't sign for the university.

What Helikon does with it

On the Helikon platform, each project records whether it needs an NDA, IRB approval, or a signed contract, when each was signed or approved and when it expires, with the signed copy attached from the project's files, and the project owner gets an email before anything expires.