Last Update: May 22, 2020
MEMO issued to All Faculty, Deans, Directors and Chairs
Sponsored Programs COVID-19 Related Impacts and Changes
The limited access to MSU’s campus in response to COVID-19 has caused significant disruption of many research and creative activity programs.
In light of these disruptions, the central issue we need to manage together is what sponsors’ expectations may be with respect to delivery of the reasonable effort to achieve results that they awarded or contracted with us to seek. Because scholarly effort has continued in off-campus locations, and MSU’s policies have supported colleague retention, MSU has continued to pay graduate students and employees from grant accounts while access to campus facilities has been limited. Some sponsors may accept investigators’ reasonable efforts and results reflecting the constraints of the pandemic and governmentally imposed restrictions. A few may expect a full accounting of when investigators were or were not working on their projects, expecting financial reimbursement for the time work was infeasible, or granting no-cost extensions to give investigators time to complete the work.
The following memo is an attempt to forecast potential scenarios so units can prepare. Where our research is funded by external sponsors, we have a wide array of sponsor expectations for how MSU will address this lost productivity.
Read the full memo and outline for preparing documentation.
Federal funding agencies have begun to provide grant policy guidance regarding both ongoing research administration and submission of new applications. To date, guidance is incomplete and rapidly evolving. Sample guidance documents, with their most recent dates of revision, include the following:
Interested groups working in relevant research areas may find the following announcements of COVID-19 funding opportunities to be of interest: