COVID-19 Update: Award Extensions, Effort Monitoring and More
04/07/2020, 05:30:01 PM
From the Vice President for Research at the University of Houston. View this message in browser.
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Dear Research Faculty,

We continue to send you regular operational updates on the effects of COVID-19 on our research enterprise. If you would like to refer back to past letters I have sent in the past, we posted links to them on our Additional Resources page.

VPR Virtual Office Hours

The first installment of VPR Virtual Office Hours was last Friday, April 3. We had over 60 participants across UH. The next VPR Virtual Office Hours will be this coming Friday, April 10, noon-12:30 p.m. (please note the change of time). I hope you will be able to join us.

You can access the event through the Teams site where you will also find channels for topic-specific questions you might have for our directors. You can access the Teams site by joining here. I’d like to encourage you to post questions prior to the event in our VPR Office Hours channel.

Questions and responses are visible to everyone at UH. If you have project- or team-specific questions that you do not want to share with others at UH, please contact our units directly. Area-specific email inboxes for DOR offices are listed here.

Faculty Café

DOR is continuing the 50-in-5 Faculty Café sessions on University Research Explained online. The first online session, scheduled for Monday, April 20, 1 p.m.–2 p.m., will be on Identifying Grant Opportunities Using PIVOT and GrantForward. Please visit this page to register for the event.

Award Extension Requests

Some of you have already asked about extending your awards, such as start-up funds, due to COVID-19. We will continue to evaluate such requests on a case by case basis. Requests should use our standard Award Extension Request Form. The request must include a detailed justification for why the extension is needed.

Emergency Leave and Monitoring of Effort

I communicated in my March 20 email the need to monitor work from home on sponsored awards. I want to reiterate that PIs must implement an auditable process to monitor the work of all employees who are paid on sponsored awards and work from home. The PI can provide evidence for progress on the award through the standard progress report and documented communication with the program officer. For everyone else, please visit the Expenditures on Sponsored Awards page for the minimum requirements for a monitoring plan and a spreadsheet that can be downloaded and used for monitoring. (The same page also provides updates on effort certification for the small number of non-essential researchers who are paid on sponsored awards but are unable to work from home.)

 

Best regards,

Amr Elnashai, FREng  
Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer

Amr Elnashai | VP for Research and Technology Transfer | elnashai@uh.edu

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