This is an application for a SCORE Institutional Development Award (S06) from New Mexico State University at Las Cruces, designed to improve the institutional research environment and enhance the capacity of faculty researchers to conduct competitive biomedical research. The proposed S06 SCORE project has 4 major goals and 10 objectives. Goal 1 is to formulate and implement institutional changes in research fiscal administration based on a recently completed, comprehensive survey study of the research environment at NMSU. The objectives of this goal are to develop initiatives within select institutional offices through the Vice President for Research that reduce the time required for incipient processing of new grant awards;reduce the time required to authorize purchase orders for research supplies;develop personnel hiring mechanisms for externally funded research projects that require 30 days or less;and seek and implement solutions to a myriad of intrusive administrative fiscal practices that impede research progress. Some of these practices relate to the PI's authority to initiate purchase orders, adoption of local authorities approved by NIH, and close-out of budget year expenditures. Goal 2 is to support and expand the research services and instrumentation available in a shared, core instrumentation facility which provides analytical services required by the investigators of SC1, SC2, SC3 (abbreviated SCn) SCORE grants. The objectives of this goal are to conduct activities that maintain support for a core facility laboratory and manager/ operator, who provides valuable services for PIs of SCORE SCn grants. Goal 3 is to sponsor workshops and external speaker seminars, provide access to tutorials, and provide services which inform and train SCn SCORE grant awardees to transition to non-SCORE external sources of research funding. The objectives of this goal are to arrange annual on-site workshops for training SCn grantees for submission of NIH R01 applications;to transition half of the SCn grant recipients of the SCORE Program at NMSU out of SCORE support within the next 4 years;and to increase the percentage of SCORE-supported PIs who submit R01 research grant applications from the current baseline of 41% to 80%. Goal 4 is to conduct an annual evaluation of the impact of individual investigator-initiated SCn grants on the overall status of the biomedical research capacity of the institution and its impact on the missions of existing NIH-MORE programs at NMSU. The objective of this goal is to maintain databases from which to gauge the status of the institutional capacity to conduct biomedical research and its capacity to advance URM scientists to completion of Ph.D. degrees under the new SCn grants format.
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