IOFM Core: Infrastructure and Opportunities Management Core Project Summary The NIH Cooperative Centers on Human Immunology (CCHI) program was designed to promote research in human immunology by providing funding for 8-10 Programs as well as additional financial support for pilot projects, new resource and reagent development and/or cross-program collaborative efforts. These developmental awards are made possible through funding provided by the Infrastructure and Opportunity Fund (IOF) grant. The Infrastructure and Opportunity Fund grant is awarded to one of the Programs supported through the CCHI U19 mechanism. The institution that receives the Infrastructure and Opportunity Funds grant is responsible for establishing an Infrastructure and Opportunity Fund Management Core (IOFMC). The IOFMC works with the NIH Program officers and the CCHI scientific steering committee to solicit, review and distribute Infrastructure and Opportunity Funds as subawards to researchers at the IOFMC parent institution and investigators working at other institutions, who are, in many cases, members of one of the other funded CCHI cooperative centers. The IOFMC is responsible for administrative oversight of the subawards and for ensuring that the recipient of the award and the institution in which they work are in compliance with all applicable state, NIH and federal regulations and that charges to the subaward are reasonable and allowable. Finally, the IOFMC must also provide annual financial reports on the awarded subcontracts to NIH. The major goal of the UAB IOFMC will be to establish an administrative structure that will manage the subaward program from the request for applications (RFA) stage, to the pre- and post-award process, and through the grant close- out and reporting phase. In order to meet this goal, we will: (i) coordinate the IOF project application and selection process; (ii) establish subcontracts to distribute IOF development and pilot project grants to Project Leaders at other institutions; (iii) provide administrative and fiscal oversight of these subawards; and (iv) serve as the communications interface between IOF awardees, the CCHI steering committee and the NIH. Successful and timely completion of these objectives by the UAB IOFMC will allow the NIH to leverage the intellectual, infrastructure and unique reagents/samples that are present in the CCHI network institutions to advance the overall scientific goals of the CCHI program.
