Research Newsblog
All human subject, animal subject and recombinant DNA applications submitted to the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance between November 11-18 will be put into process on November 19. Thank you for your patience.
If you are a Mac user, you may receive an error message when trying to open the new transmittal sheet for proposal submission to external sponsors. To open the file from the website, http://www.mtu.edu/research/references/forms/, please follow the directions below:
To open the file, right click the link, click “Save Link As” and save the file to your desktop. Open Adobe Acrobat, click “File”, “Open” and search for the file saved on your desktop.
Effective immediately, Michigan Tech will begin assessing the uncapped facilities and administrative cost rate [currently 63%] to all industrial sponsored proposals. As always, Sponsored Programs will consider requests to reduce the assessed F&A rate when cost share is required on a project, when there are concerns about cost-competitiveness of a proposal, and when the project has a maximum total cost – the form for requesting such a reduction is at http://www.mtu.edu/research/administration/sponsored-programs/pdf/IDCreduct_waiver.pdf.
Federal pass through funding will continue to be assessed the appropriate federal rate, and all proposals previously submitted with the capped rate will be grandfathered at the rate at which they were submitted.
The Office of Naval Research has recently issued a provisional Fringe Benefit rate for Michigan Tech. Effective July 1, 2009, the regular and grant funded employee’s fringe rate of 42.6% will be applied to all funds.
Effective immediately, the regular and grant funded employee fringe benefit rate of 42.6% will be used in Sponsored Programs proposal budgets. The new fringe benefit rate will apply to supplemental or additional funding where funding is added for work beyond what was contained in the original agreement. The funding will generally be given a new index number in order to be separated from the funding in the original agreement.
For existing and incrementally funded Sponsored Programs, the fringe rate for regular and grant funded employees will be the lower of the rates used in the proposal budget or the new 42.6% rate.
The existing rates for the employee types, as described below, will be applied to all funds and will also be used in Sponsored Programs proposal budgets:
The current provisional rate agreement can be found on the Research Offices website at http://www.mtu.edu/research/references/facts-figures/.
The Office of Naval Research has recently issued provisional (temporary) F&A rates for Michigan Tech. Although these rates were effective as of July 1, 2009, they are to be used in Sponsored Programs budgets that have a proposal submission deadline on or after August 1, 2009.
What does this mean for sponsored projects? For existing projects and incrementally funded projects, the rates in effect at the time the project was awarded will continue to be charged. For projects awarded under the provisional rates, the provisional rate will be charged until the pre-determined (final) rate agreements are fully-executed. Incrementally funded projects exist when incremental awards will be received throughout the approved project period referenced in the original agreement; therefore, these project F&A rates would remain the same. The new rates will apply to supplemental or additional proposals where funding is being requested for work beyond what was contained in the original agreement. When awarded, the supplemental and additional funding will generally be given a new index number in order to account for the different rates.
The current provisional rate agreement can be found on the Sponsored Programs Office website at http://www.mtu.edu/research/references/facts-figures/.
The graduate student estimating tables for stipend levels and tuition and fee rates has been updated. These rates are to be used in proposal budgets to external sponsors. You can find the tables at Sponsored Programs Budget Estimating Tables.
These rates are effective immediately.
The Sponsored Programs Office would like to inform you of the following proposal submission change. Due to an expected increase in Grants.gov submissions relating to the processing of Recovery Act proposals, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has authorized agencies to use alternative methods for proposal submission and acceptance.
Effective immediately, new funding opportunities issued by NSF will exclusively require the use of FastLane to prepare and submit proposals. NSF plans to revise existing funding opportunity documents to reflect this change and to remove all active application packages from Grants.gov APPLY. Updated NSF information about available funding opportunities will be posted to Grants.gov FIND.
Once you have identified your grant opportunity, be sure to carefully read the instructions to ensure you are following proper submission procedures for that application, even if you have applied before. Grants.gov will still be the one place to find all available federal grant opportunities and all opportunities will include specific application instructions, including instructions for submitting applications outside of Grants.gov.
These agencies will be accepting some or all applications outside of Grants.gov: Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Education (DOED), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Treasury, Department of Transportation (DOT), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Air and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Please pay close attention to the grant announcements and application instructions for these agencies.
Detailed instructions regarding the technical aspects of proposal preparation and submission via FastLane are available at: http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/.
If you have any questions contact the Sponsored Programs Office at 487-2226.
Wayne Pennington, chair of the Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences, has been named a Jefferson Science Fellow by the US Department of State. Check out the Tech Today article for more information.
Physicists at Michigan Technological University have filled in some longtime blank spaces on the periodic table, calculating fundamental properties of the lanthanides, a series of 15 elements known as rare earths.
Specifically, they have determined their electron affinities, the amount of energy required to detach an electron from an anion, or negative ion (an atom with an extra electron orbiting around its nucleus). Elements with low electron affinities (like iron) give up that extra electron easily. Elements with high electron affinities (like chlorine) do not.
“I remember learning about electron affinities in 10th grade chemistry,” said Research Associate Steven O’Malley. “When I began working as a grad student in atomic physics, I was surprised to learn that many of them were still unknown.”
Among them were the lanthanides, which are used in the production of lasers and sunglasses. In terms of their atomic structure, lanthanides are among the most complex elements on the periodic table, which is why no one had been able to calculate their electron affinities before.
Here’s what makes them so tricky. Electrons orbit in shells around an atom’s nucleus, something like the layers of an onion, but in stranger shapes. Within each shell are a number of subshells. A subshell is like an egg carton: it can hold from one to a certain number of electrons, but no more.
Typically, as you work your way down and across the periodic table to larger and larger atoms, the inner shells fill up with electrons, and then new shells and subshells are formed and fill up pretty neatly.
That’s not what happens with the lanthanides. Before their so-called 4f subshell fills up, the additional electrons begin making new shells. Then, gradually, as you move across the periodic table to heavier atoms in the lanthanide series, that 4f subshell finally fills up with its maximum number of 14 electrons.
Why would this matter for electron affinity? A number of forces hold electrons in their orbits around the atom’s nucleus. Two simple ones are electrons’ attraction to protons in the nucleus and repulsion away from their fellow orbiting electrons, what physics professor Don Beck calls “the B.O. effect.”
The forces exerted by a full shell on the electrons orbiting farther from the nucleus are pretty constant, which had made it relatively easy to calculate the electron affinities of most elements. But if there are vacancies in the shell–as there are in the lanthanides–the electrons in that shell can move around, playing musical chairs, as it were.
The forces an electron exerts from each spot in the shell are different. And, in addition to simple electrical factors, there are many complex variables to contend with at the subatomic level, including relativistic and many-body effects.
“It’s a nightmare,” says Beck. With several electrons bouncing around in those 14 slots, over 200 different arrangements of electrons of the 4f subshell are possible in some of the lanthanides.
In 1994, the Beck research group, supported by the National Science Foundation, began work on one of the simpler lanthanide atoms, cerium. Then they started to approach the “nightmare” middle of the lanthanide row from both ends, one anion at a time. The most difficult was neodymium (Nd-) which took about six months.
In 2007, O’Malley and Beck began a final push to complete the remaining lanthanides (promethium through erbium) by
(1) narrowing down which variables to include in the calculations; and
(2) writing scripts and computer codes to automate much of the calculation.
Ultimately, they cut the overall work time by about 85 percent. In just 18 months, they found electron affinities for all the lanthanides, including electron affinities for high-energy, excited states of the anions. All in all, they discovered 118 lanthanide anion states, 63 of which were new.
What’s next? The team’s theoretical results have already been partially verified by experimentalists, but they are still working to better understand the lanthanides theoretically, to help identify just what is being measured experimentally.
In the meantime, they are turning their attention to the next row in the periodic table.
“We expect to have electron affinities for a portion of the actinides–actinum through plutonium–available sometime this summer,” Beck said.
For more in-depth information, visit http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~donald/ri.html#lea.
The electronic proposal submission system named Grants.gov has numerous system performance issues and one affecting Michigan Tech is extremely slow server response time when submitting proposal applications. Institutions across the nation are experiencing this same issue. At Michigan Tech alone we had 3 proposals in the last two weeks that we were unable to submit due to slow server response time. This issue of slow response time is beyond the control of staff in the Sponsored Programs Office (SPO).
At a national meeting representatives from NIH said that there is not a quick fix to the slow server response time and that institutions need to plan accordingly and submit their proposals early. They also encouraged institutions not to wait until the day the application is due to submit their proposal but to instead submit early to ensure a successful application.
The SPO procedure for proposal submission states, the complete proposal and all applicable internal paperwork (i.e. transmittal sheet, budget, cost share forms, etc.) are due to the Sponsored Programs Office 48 hours prior to the submission deadline. At minimum we strongly encourage all faculty and staff to adhere to the 48 hours prior to submission deadline. We recommend the complete proposal and applicable internal paperwork be in the Sponsored Programs Office 72 hours prior to the submission deadline for Grants.gov applications.
If you have any questions about Grants.gov please contact SPO at 487-2226. Below are a few tips to help with Grants.gov applications.
