Cost Allocation: Multiple Projects, One Funding Source
Simple steps to avoid an audit when you have one funding source but multiple projects.
Articles for author: Sarah Hill
“Just the Facts, Please…” Will Biden’s Appointments Mean Funding?
President Biden seems to be putting scientific research first. Will the new science appointments, especially in his Cabinet, mean more funding?
Do Ask, Do Tell: Disclosing Research Collaborations
Charles Lieber was the head of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology until he and two additional Chinese academics in Boston were arrested last year. According to a U.S. Department of Justice press release: “These cases are part of the Department of Justice’s China Initiative, which reflects the strategic priority of countering Chinese ...
F&A: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Facilities and Administrative costs (F&A), also known as Indirect Costs or IDC, are at the very least misunderstood by researchers. At their worst, they smack of “Big Brother.” But F&A costs truly are transparent and nothing to fear (or despise!) Keeping the Lights On F&A are costs that cannot be uniquely associated with a particular ...
Too Close for Comfort: Human Subjects Research in the Age of COVID
How close is six feet? Try to picture two golden retrievers standing nose to tail. Or a regular mattress. Or even the width of the front of your car. All of these measure in at about six feet. But what happens when human research subjects need to be closer than six feet away from the research team?
Corporate Compliance and Ethics Week
November 1-7 is a week set aside for reviewing your university’s rules and regulations. Creating a culture of compliance is important.
Funny You Should Ask: Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?
This is The Big Idea’s reoccurring segment where we ask some of our top professors from across the University of Houston to weigh in on a truism or idiom – a safe place for them to rant, wax poetic or dazzle us with their clever take on age-old adages. First, a photographer… As most photographers ...
From Concept to Commercialization: The Importance of Supporting IP in our Universities
The road to the next life-altering discovery, invention or device often begins with university-imagined Intellectual Property (IP) and ends when an outside company makes the investment to productize the discovery. Is there enough emphasis placed on this pipeline nationwide? The more one looks at this complicated question, we see there are numerous problems; in a ...
Getting (Un)Involved: Climate Change Researchers and The Paris Agreement
“We’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money.” These words regarding climate change were spoken by Mick Mulvaney, director of the Trump Administration’s Office of Management and Budget. The government has rolled back policies that aimed to slow down climate change and reduce environmental pollution. It ...
How Are You Sleeping?
Avoiding errors When you ask anyone, including researchers, how they are sleeping these days, the typical answer is an invitation to hear about myriad sleep disturbances: vivid or lucid dreams, waking throughout the night, restless leg syndrome and just plain old insomnia. COVID-19, civil unrest and uncertainty about the future of our nation have brought ...
Internal Awards for COVID and Racial Justice Research
These months have been difficult. Every person has tired of the quarantine. Tired of the anxiety, the endless memes on social media, the debates. At the same time, we’re facing issues of race relations. These issues are taxing. But higher education is strong. Universities are using its font of resources to understand these important issues ...
Opening Moves: Expanding Research in Machine Learning
One might not expect the game of checkers to have anything to do with Artificial Intelligence, but the game really marked the beginning of machine learning in 1959. Pioneered by an MIT professor named Arthur Lee Samuel, it was discovered that teaching a simple strategy game to a computer is not so simple when every ...
“Zoom Fatigue” Is Real
Learn about some scenarios that may be causing you something known as Zoom Fatigue.
RAPID-ly Slowing the Spread of COVID-19
With the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a natural uptick in the amount of funded Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grants from the NSF. With an abbreviated timeline, these grants go to the researchers on the frontlines.
Staying Sane: Mental Health Research in the Time of COVID-19
“Rapid and rigorous research into the impact of COVID-19 on mental health is needed to limit the impact of the pandemic.” The impact on the mental health of individuals may be long-lasting and significant, say experts.
Are You “Essential Research Personnel”?
Many researchers have begun to work from home due to the novel new virus, COVID-19, with only essential personnel able to work on university campuses. For a researcher, what is considered “essential personnel”?
Citation Farms and Circles of Self-citation
Self-citation is a sensitive topic in some circles. Especially circles that are known disdainfully as “citation farms,” which consist of authors who routinely and massively self-cite or cite each other in order to boost the impact of their publications. While these “citation farms,” also known as “citation cartels,” are thought to be the hallmark of ...
Are You a Lab Rat? How to Achieve a Work/Life Balance as a Researcher
You just missed your niece’s birthday, misplaced your debit card and forgot to eat dinner last night after working late in the lab. These are relatively benign examples of collateral damage for a researcher who is overworked. But what about the female researcher who puts off having a family because she is working 80 hours ...
Securing the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) “There are a number of problems with ushering in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), which all center on the security capabilities of the connected system,” writes Nick Ismail of Information Age magazine. The Big Hitter Aron Laszka, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science ...
Research Recruitment in the Age of Social Media
What if you were scrolling through your social media feed and an advertisement for a hair loss treatment kept popping up. Now say you were bald. So, being interested in this new hair loss treatment, you made an appointment at the location described in the ad. When you got there, you were given the choice ...
Reproducibility, Rigor and Rigmarole
Imagine a hypothetical “Dear Abby” letter to the science community: “I am the principal investigator and corresponding author on a paper detailing research findings in our lab. A leading investigator at another university contacted me and states that she cannot duplicate our results. I re-ran the samples analyzed by my post-doc and I couldn’t either. ...
