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The Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP), Contract and Grant Administration (CGA), and Sponsored Programs Administration (SPA) will be observing MSU’s 2024 winter break from Tuesday, December 24, 2024 through Wednesday, January 1, 2025. OSP/CGA/SPA staff will not be working during this time and actions requiring our involvement (e.g. proposals, RPPRs, etc.) must be submitted to the appropriate office by noon on Friday, December 20, 2024.

The Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP), Contract and Grant Administration (CGA), and Sponsored Programs Administration (SPA) staff are observing MSU’s 2024 winter break from Tuesday, December 24, 2024 through Wednesday, January 1, 2025.

Happy Holidays!

Issue 38: Friday Updates, 7/27/18

S2S Fellowship Applications – When to Affiliate

For System-to-System (S2S) fellowship applications, you may need to request that the fellowship candidate be added as an affiliate in order for them to be able to approve the proposal in KC. Many S2S fellowship applications require the fellowship candidate to be included as the Principal Investigator, which in KC, requires the candidate to be able to log into the system and approve the proposal while in route. Whether or not you need to make an affiliate request for a fellowship candidate depends on the following scenarios:

  1. Pre-doctoral fellowships for current MSU graduate students – must request the graduate student be added as an affiliate.  The graduate student will need to setup Two-Factor Authentication.
  2. Post-doctoral fellowships for current MSU research associates – do not need to be affiliated. They should already have access to approve, however they must have Two-Factor Authentication setup.
  3. Post-doctoral fellowships for research associates who are not currently at MSU and are unable to go through the pre-onboarding process – must request the research associate be affiliated in order to add them as a PI in the system, however because they won’t have an MSU Net ID they will not be able to approve the proposal document.  Please work with your Proposal Team to get the proper approvals for the proposal development document in KC.

Affiliate requests should be sent to the KC Helpdesk.  For scenario 1, because the student’s information is already in the system the email to the helpdesk only needs to request that the student be added as an affiliate so that they may approve the PD document.  For scenario 3, the affiliation request needs to include the following information:

  • First and Last Name
  • Email address
  • Address (can use department address)
  • Phone (can use department phone)
  • Anticipated home unit

If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not a candidate needs to be affiliated, please contact the KC Helpdesk early in the proposal process.  They can easily look up the candidate and help you with next steps.

Performance Issues

This week KC experienced some sporadic performance issues when building budgets with more than two budget periods and using the “generate all periods” from the parameters screen. (See below)

Generate all periods button highlighted on the Budget Periods screen

In these instances and just as a reminder, instead of using the “generate all periods”, in the first year of your budget you can select “apply to later periods” for each object code in your budget to add those costs to out years of the budget. The results are the same as if you used “generate all periods.”

Apply to later periods buttons highlighted on the Other Direct tab screen Budget Periods screen showing example of budgets generated for periods through 2023 after apply to later periods button is used

The performance issues have been resolved, however, if you have any questions or concerns about performance with the system, please contact the KC Helpdesk at 517-355-2000.

Budget Report #1

An update has been made to Budget Report #1 (Budget Costshare Summary Report) in KC. The report now displays a summary at the end of the report that shows Total Direct, Total F&A, Total Cost to Sponsor, Total Cost Sharing and Total Cost of Project by period. Below is a sample of what the report will look like, with the Investigator name redacted.

Example of Budget Report showing new summary totals at bottom of the report

Question Related to Minors has been added to the Questionnaire

As mentioned in the June 15, 2018 update, a new question related to minors (children under the age of 18) has been added to the KC Questionnaire tab. The question includes additional helpful details within the More Information link. A draft of the new question is as follows:

Will minors (children under the age of 18) participate in this project?

Will minors (children under the age of 18) participate in this project? A minor is defined in the University-wide youth programs policy as a person under the age of eighteen who is not enrolled or accepted for enrollment at the University. Students who are dually enrolled in University programs while also enrolled in elementary, middle, or high school are not included in this policy unless such enrollment includes a residential component in University housing. Visit the following site for more information: https://youthprograms.msu.edu.

All Proposal Development (PD) documents that were In Progress before the question was added will receive the following notice at the top of the Questionnaire tab:

Questionnaire Update Status: Update Required. Default answer: Copy the answers from the old version of questionnaire to the new one. Only questions that have been changed in the new version will have to be answered.

Leave the default answer selected and click the update button. This will bring in the new question to be answered. It will also require you to re-answer the question, “Have patent or copyright commitments been promised to the sponsor.” This is due to a question format change behind the scenes. Please note that the wording of this question has NOT changed.

PD documents that were already in route when the question was added will not be impacted by the change to the Questionnaire. PD documents that are created after July 26, 2018 will automatically include the new question and you will not be prompted to update the Questionnaire.

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