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Hong Wang, a professor of pharmacology, has been awarded a four-year, $1.5 million continuation grant for her project, “Homocysteine and Endothelial Cell Growth Inhibition,” by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
“Dr. Wang has been at the forefront in using eRA,” said Robert W. O’Malley, eRA@TU project manager. “Actually, the whole Department of Pharmacology has been one our leaders in using this system, along with the Cardiovascular Research Center and the Department of Physiology.
“We have had a lot of cooperation from our schools and departments that have been part of our initial deployment of eRA, with them sending all of their NIH proposals through us,” O’Malley said.
“It is a very user-friendly system and being updated with new features regularly,” added Diane Durr, administrator for the Department of Pharmacology and Center for Substance Abuse Research. “It is helpful for everyone involved — the principal investigator, the department administrator, the Office of Sponsored Projects and the eRA office — to have the ability to access the system from different locations at the same time.”
Durr said that previously, when a researcher would have to download a grant proposal form from the funding agency, information could only be entered by one person at a time and the form had to be e-mailed from party to party. Keeping track of the proposal’s various versions was also an issue.
“Under eRA, the proposal is up-to-the-minute and many people who need to add or review data can access it simultaneously,” Durr said. “The faculty have really adapted to it in the electronic age.”
O’Malley said Richard Coico, senior associate dean for research at Temple’s School of Medicine, has been especially supportive of eRA@TU and is working with O’Malley’s office to get more departments at the School of Medicine involved in using the system.
So far, Temple has put through more than 70 system-to-system submissions to the NIH, including at least eight from Pharmacology. “Temple is probably in the upper 10-15 percent that has been successful in electronically submitting proposals to grants.gov, the federal electronic interface to the research community,” O’Malley said.
The system currently supports proposals to the NIH and the National Science Foundation, though only NIH proposals have been submitted so far. By the end of the calendar year, O’Malley said he expects the system to support electronic submissions to all federal agencies.
The eRA office also will soon be rolling out eSPAF (electronic sponsored project administrative form), which will allow for submitting grant proposals regardless of the funding agency.
“The researcher who is submitting a proposal to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, for example, still has to do it the old way, since that sponsor will probably never support system-to-system submissions,” he said. “eSPAF is going to allow that researcher to create all of their documentation, attach it to an online proposal, and then route it through the university for approval.”
Other additions that will be made to eRA in the near future, O’Malley said, will be its move to a new portal or Web interface, the hiring of a new staff person who will be responsible for training and documentation, and the debut of an electronic Web-based protocol development module this summer.
“Researchers will be able to create their human subject or lab animal protocols on the Web and have it routed electronically to all the proper boards for oversight and approval,” he said.
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