The CAHSS Creative Achievement and Research Administration Team – CARAT – provides proposal development (pre-award) and grant administration (post-award) services to faculty Principal Investigators (PIs) seeking and receiving funding for arts, humanities, and social science research and creative achievement projects. The following guidelines are intended to be useful to both PIs and their department chairs. Visit the CARAT website at carat.umbc.edu, or contact CARAT staff at carat@umbc.edu.
Proposal Development (Pre-Award)
For the pre-award stage, CARAT’s staff assist faculty PIs with proposal development, budget preparation, subaward development, timelines, work plans, and application assembly. They liaison with sponsors, departments, the CAHSS Dean’s Office, the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP), and other offices, and assist with PI Eligibility and proposal routing in Kuali, UMBC’s cloud-based research administration tool. Please note that faculty who submit proposals and receive awards through UMBC must complete the PI Eligibility process.
CARAT has expertise in preparing grant and fellowship proposals to arts, humanities, and social science sponsors, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of International Education (IIE)/Fulbright, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Whiting Foundation, Library of Congress, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Maryland Humanities, Maryland State Arts Council, the National Institutes of Health (which is comprised of 27 Institutes and Centers), the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States Department of Agriculture, the United States Department of Justice, the United States Department of State, the Department of Natural Resources, the Institutes of Education Sciences, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the American Institute for Research, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Russel Sage Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, various local, state, non-profit and corporate agencies.
Proposal development and approval through the routing process requires adequate time. Depending on the type and complexity of the proposal, plan between 2 – 6 weeks for this process.
Faculty may request a consultation or begin a new proposal with CARAT here.
Also, consult: CAHSS Guidelines for Proposal Routing
Grant Administration (Post-Award)
After an award has been received at UMBC, CARAT’s staff provides post-award services that include financial tracking, budget management, re-budgeting, analysis, projections, no-costs extension requests, assisting with reporting to sponsors, compliance validation, close-out process, and transactions that include payroll, human resources, graduate student onboarding, procurement, subaward processing and monitoring, and travel arrangements.
Considerations for Grant Administration Support
There are a number of considerations to consider when an award is ready to be administered. PIs and Chairs should be aware of these considerations for general planning purposes.
- Type of award: Is this a grant or a fellowship? Smaller grants and individual fellowships, as well as any internal awards, are generally managed by the PI’s department. In these cases, CARAT will work with the department, OSP, Dean’s Office, and OCGA to ensure the department is ready to administer the award, following University and sponsor regulations and policies. Larger, multi-year and/or more complex grants can require additional grants expertise and therefore are appropriate for CARAT’s post-award support.
- Size and longevity of the award: Will the budget and length of the award strain the department’s administrative resources?
- Cost-share: Does the project require cost-share, either UMBC match or third-party or in-kind cost-share?
- Complexity of the project: Does the project involve any of the following: multiple investigators and/or partnerships with external institutions or organizations; extensive or large-scale procurements, subawards, travel, additional and/or atypical hiring; international partners; compliance considerations (i.e., human subjects, data management, export control, etc.); or waiver of F&A costs?
- Reporting and other compliance requirements: Does the sponsor require regular financial and other types of reports?