Grants & Contracts Specialist, Post-Award Team (Hybrid/Remote)

Required Qualifications (as evidenced by an attached resume):
Bachelor’s degree (foreign equivalent or higher). In lieu of a Bachelor’s degree, a combination of higher education and administrative experience equaling four (4) years may be considered. Two (2) years of full-time finance, accounting, and/or administrative experience.

Preferred Qualifications: 
Experience using electronic pre- and post-award systems such as Grants.gov, NIH ASSIST, NSF Research.gov, Grants Solutions, Huron Click, InfoEd, Cayuse. Experience developing or analyzing grant budgets. Experience managing grant application processes. Experience interpreting and applying policies from multiple levels of authority (federal, state, and institutional). Customer service experience. Experience with pre- and/or post-award management in a government, non-profit, and/or academic setting.

Brief Description of Duties:
The Office for Research and Innovation (ORI) is seeking post-award grants and contracts professionals to fill one specialist position vacancy. The role provides post-award administrative guidance, oversight, and assistance to faculty and staff to facilitate University research and sponsored program activity, in accordance with federal and state laws, sponsor guidelines, and the Research Foundation and/or University policies and procedures. 

The Grants & Contracts Specialist serves as a research administration professional within Sponsored Programs, accepting workflow assignments and providing the highest level of service to faculty on post-award actions. As an integral part of the research administration community and in support of the University’s overall research mission, this position requires an unwavering commitment to service and excellence in a demanding, deadline-driven environment. This position involves working closely with and serving as a liaison between faculty and staff within the college and across campus to meet administrative award management objectives and deadlines, using a variety of communications methods.

The Grants & Contracts Specialist will keep abreast of laws, regulations, external and internal policies, and procedures governing the administration of grants and cooperative agreements. They will be adaptable and flexible to accommodate ongoing changes to policies and regulations; facilitating short lead times on proposal or project deliverables; balancing conflicting priorities; and contributing and adjusting to a continuously evolving environment are vital. They will contribute to the ongoing improvement of workflow, current practices, business processes, and policy.

The successful incumbent must have strong verbal and written communication skills, exceptional interpersonal skills and ability to interact collaboratively with a diverse constituent population, ability to work independently and in a team-based environment to achieve common goals, strong attention to detail, and strong organizational and prioritization skills, and ability to meet deadlines.

• Review, negotiate, and approve terms and conditions for grants and cooperative agreements; Ensure that the Principal Investigator (PI) has obtained all required certifications and assurances (regarding, for example, the use of animals or human subjects in research, biohazards, conflict of interest etc.).
  • Serve as a liaison between the university community and the external sponsor regarding non-fiscal research award management issues.
  • Coordinate non-fiscal and limited fiscal award management and process actions that require prior sponsor approval and/or those allowed by the expanded authorities (including Grantee Approved No-Cost Extensions; Sponsor Approved No Cost Extensions, Change in Scope; Budget Revisions/Reallocations; Carryforward requests; etc); with an understanding of the budgetary implications of each action.
  • Review and process non-competing continuations, including review of budgetary aspects of the award such as unobligated balances that merit Sponsor prior approval. 
  • Initiate Award Set-up after thorough review of Notice of Award, determine if an undistributed or detailed budget is required.
  • Review and submit progress reports that require AOR signature (including non-SNAP NIH RPPRs that require detailed budgets, explanations of unobligated balances, identify when carryforward approval is required, etc), ensure Other Support Documen