November 2, 2020

Attendees: Jerry Lin, Ana Christensen, Chunda Chen, Xianchange Li, Amy Smith

Missing Council Members: Ken Young, Richard Gachot, Scott Crawford,

Jerry Lin called the meeting to order at 12:35pm.

I. Review/Approval of October 5, 2020 Council meeting minutes

Motion to approve the October 5 minutes made by Amy Smith

Motion seconded by Ana Christensen

Motion approved

II. Approval of procedures for paying for external parties on grants

Jerry Lin: This is one item we talked about last month and I spent some time negotiating with Post Award and Finance. We are trying to solve the problem of paying people who are not Lamar employees off grants. The PI will need to pay participants from project funds such as stipends for external research students or teachers K-12 school districts. We also have summer camps that needs payment processing. After simplifying the typical process used for request to pay vendors, a procedure document has been drafted for your input and approval. In the procedure, PIs need to ask all the participants to provide a W-9 for each participant that will receive payment and compile the list of participants for payment processing. Please review the document and we will vote on it in our next meeting.

Ana Christensen: I have one question. Will project consultants also be included in the procedure?

Jerry Lin: Yes, they should. I will revise the procedure to include project consultants and share the file in Teams file folder. Please review and we will vote in our December meeting.

III. Draft policy for the role and responsibility of sponsored programs administration

Jerry Lin: We have a draft document that defines the roles and responsibilities for sponsored programs administration. I would like to invite the council members to review the draft, provide comments and we can vote for the policy in our December meeting. This is the first time that that LU has develop such policies. The objectives are (1) communicate who should do what when it comes to managing externally sponsored grants, (2) inform Department Chairs and College Deans on what they certify during the proposal routing process, and (3) inform PIs on the areas that they need to pay attention to during grant activities. The post-award finance will also review the draft and we will vote for the revised document in the December meeting. Any comments or suggestions?

Amy Smith: Sounds good and makes sense to me.

IV. Discussion on project close-out

 Jerry Lin: We also discussed this briefly at the previous meeting. We have had a few industrial projects that have remained open, which causes accounting issues. I would like to form a mechanism to close out these projects once completed. A procedure document will be drafted for your review and recommendation. Do you have any suggestions or input on this process?

None.

V. Roundtable

Indirect revenue. If you have questions regarding IDC, we have started the implementation for the approved IDC policy. The Department (7.5%) and PI (10%) portion of the IDC generated in FY20 & onward will be managed and tracked by ORSPA. Please help inform the PIs that they are welcome to use the IDC they generated for research-related items.