The Sponsored Operations Office is dedicated to providing a business infrastructure in support of the Vice President for Research (VPR) administrative operations. Our focus is on core functions that drive efficiency and effectiveness in research administration, applying best practices for managing administrative operations, while ensuring smooth workflow processes and support for researchers and the administrative staff.
We oversee Cayuse, a cloud-based electronic research administration (eRA) system, used to manage the University’s portfolio of proposals, awards, subawards, technologies, agreements, inventions, research proposal related conflict of interest, human and animal ethics and institutional biosafety activities.
Our main functions include the oversight and management of the research database ensuring to maintain operational continuity, user support, data integrity and analysis, interpretation, reporting, implementation of technological solutions to streamline day-to-day tasks, and university level certifications and assurances for proposal submissions and award negotiations.
We encourage you to browse our Resources and to contact us (soo-l@mtu.edu) with questions you may have regarding the use of Cayuse or the data behind it.
Requesting Proposal and Award Data
This office is the central source for official University proposal and award data and activity. The data is used to feed information to other University resources and tools, as well as to keep researchers, deans, chairs, directors and other administrators informed of their individual or unit’s activities.
We have a long history of proposal and award activity and with the new Cayuse eRA, department and center administrators now have direct access and transparency to their unit’s recent activity. Access to that data is dependent upon a user's authorized secure role. An important data point to keep in mind is at the time of Cayuse's implementation, sponsored projects proposal and award legacy data with submit or award dates on or after July 1, 2012 were migrated into Cayuse.
As our customer, we will continue to support your reporting needs. To receive proposal and award data on an ad hoc basis complete a request form. We strive to fulfill requests within 24-48 hours on business days. During periods of high request volume, additional time may be required. Please note that all requests for award expenditure data must be submitted to Sponsored Programs Accounting.
Our Practice for Managing Aged Submitted Proposals
In Cayuse, proposals will remain in Submitted to Sponsor status for a maximum of fourteen (14) months following submission. A monthly Sponsored Operations process will identify 14-month-old proposals and their status’ will be changed from Submitted to Sponsor to Closed with a Resolution=Not Funded.
If for some reason, a proposal that was Closed with a Resolution=Not Funded later becomes funded because of a delay (it is rare but can happen), don’t worry, the central administrators can change the status of the proposal to fund it.