GRANT DEVELOPMENT SPECIALIST III

To serve as a senior and key member of a team of grant advisors who is responsible for the entire grant development and submission process for departments and their faculty in the UAB School of Medicine. To work to build an advisor-and-scientist relationship with investigators. To oversee pre-award research activities for a group of departments within the School of Medicine, while providing technical expertise and guidance, and ensuring adherence to all research sponsor and UAB guidelines, policies, and regulations. To partner directly with faculty to guide them through the grant development (pre-award) phase, including leading the project management aspects and approach, drafting and developing the proposal's budget development, completing document preparation and verification, making improvements to the administrative and scientific content, populating the grant s submission portal (e.g., NIH s ASSIST), and completing the grant s initial and final submission to the UAB Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP). To serve as an advisor and reporting to the Director of Research Administration-Shared Services, identifies, reviews and makes determinations on current funding opportunity announcements and their applicability to investigators and their related scientific research programs. To identify sponsor deadlines and to create a detailed project management plan tailored to specific PIs to ensure a successful research proposal submission(s). To use productivity tools (e.g., MS Teams, Asana) to proactively monitor a team s pre-award activities and their development plans to ensure the Dean s Office has the appropriate availability of resources for proposal development and pre-award activities and services. To provide faculty level training, presentations and identify areas of both institutional, federal, and other extramural support for investigative teams. To cultivate relationships with SOM faculty and staff and encourage collaborations with UAB faculty, UAB s Office of Sponsored Programs, external institutions, foundations, and other collaborators. To work closely with the Director to identify and plan the strategic development objectives and activities of the office. To create and develop monitoring tools, to collect and synthesize qualitative and quantitative data, create data analysis and visualization tools and populate tracking mechanisms for award activities in the SOM.

Key Duties/Responsibilities

• Serves as a trusted point-of-contact on all communications related to pre-award activities.

• Effectively liaises with sponsor agencies, sub-award sites, internal groups and programs, and SOM leadership, faculty and staff.

• When needed, serves as a source of information related to post-award activities to advise faculty and staff.

• Prepares, refines, reviews and submits fully populated and complete sponsored research proposals for SOM faculty.

• Ensures adherence to established institutional policies and procedures, compliance with funding opportunity announcements and sponsor guidelines, accuracy and completeness.

• Ensures faculty and staff are aware of regulatory and compliance policies both within UAB and outside agencies.

• Provides direction and explanation of pre-award and post-award requirements and identified UAB resources.

• Develops, prepares and advises investigative teams on project budgets of varying scope and complexity.

• Develops, writes and advises teams on required budget justifications.

• Determines and calculates faculty and staff effort on sponsored projects. Determines, calculates and verifies project indirect costs and the appropriate exclusions.

• Advises on the fiduciary requirements and regulations of federal and non-federal awards.

• Determines and proactively monitors milestones, and redirects assignments and resources of the collaborative team according to the evolving priorities of the project timeline to ensure multiple teams across various departments are successful during the proposal development and submission process.

• Works in partnership with investigators to request and procure, create/edit/upload NIH biographical sketches (NIH biosketch).

• Creates Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) checklists and other OSP required forms, procures and edits NIH Other Support forms.

• Reviews the drafts of all grant components and provides high-level copy edits, constructive feedback to improve readability and suggests revisions as needed to all administrative materials included in an application.

• Drafts, refines, edits and collects letters of support (LOS), facilities and resources (FR) and all other required attachments in research proposals. Develops and maintains living versions of templates for LOS, FR and other commonly required materials to be used by SOM faculty.

• Uses productivity tools, such as Asana, Trello, MS Teams, and Excel, to track and disseminate project development milestones across teams and stakeholders. Designs and tailors productivity templates to meet the development needs of various research teams.

• Advises, manages and facilitates sub-award submissions, including initiating requests for sub-award agreements, building and submitting budgets and justifications, scope of work and applicable regulatory approvals.

• Schedules, coordinates and leads grant development meetings with Dean's Office staff and investigative teams.

• Determines the assignments, priorities and deadlines for the team's pre-award development activities

• Identifies and disseminates NIH Notices of Special Interest (NOSI), RFAs, and other internal and external funding announcements; works to connect PIs with institutional resources and collaborators to build multidisciplinary investigative teams.

• Works directly with the Director to develop current strategic goals and initiatives and identify novel approaches to further develop and innovate the award submission process within a shared services model. Collects and synthesizes administrative data, creates data analysis and visualization tools and populates tracking mechanisms related to SOMs award activities.

• Works with SOM data analyst on data interpretation.

• Meets with new research faculty during their on-boarding period to elucidate the SOM shared services model, provides training related to grant development and establishes a positive working relationship.

• Provides high-level technical training and assistance to existing faculty and administrators within SOM as needed.

• Serves as a liaison for SOM

Salary Range: $67,070 - $108,990

Bachelor's degree in a related field and eight (8) years of related experience required. Work experience may NOT substitute for education requirement