“Draft”
UNIVERSITY RESEARCH COUNCIL MINUTES
September 27, 2013
Members Present:
Joyce Shaw, Jorge Brown (Library) Christopher Barry (Education & Psychology)
Douglas Rust (Arts & Letters) Syd Conner (SPA),
Absent:
Louis Kyriakoudes (Arts & Letters),
Cheri Becker, FuJun Lai (Business)
Trent Gould, Carol Connell (Health)
Mohamed Elasri, Ras B. Pandey (Science and Technology)
Bonnie Lee Harbaugh, Sheila Davis (Nursing)
Lachel Story (Faculty Senate representative)
Denis Wiesenburg (VPR)
Others Present:
Gordon, Cannon (VPR)
Marcia Landen (SPA)
Sam Bruton (Research Integrity)
Shelia Johnson (SPA)
Peter Dean (GCRL)
The meeting was called to order at 3:08 p.m. by Ms. Joyce Shaw. Ms. Shaw welcomed
new member Dr. Doug Rust from the School of Music/Arts and Letters and thanked him
for his willingness to volunteer coming in to the URC. URC elections were called for by
all the deans and completed. Scheduling conflicts resulted in many of the members
being unable to attend today. Dr. Lachel Story is back as the new Faculty Senate
representative. Dr. Peter Dean, a visiting junior faculty member was on campus assisting
Ms. Shaw and she thought it would be good experience for him to sit in on the meeting.
There were no objections from the members. It was acknowledged that there were not
enough members present for quorum and this would be an information only meeting.
1. Approval of Minutes (from May 2013)
Approval of the minutes was tabled until next meeting.
2. Update Office of VP for Research (Gordon Cannon) – Dr. Cannon announced his
change in title from Vice Provost to Vice President of Research effective July 1, 2013.
He said he did not have much to report. Things are going well. Annual funding numbers
are down a little because of the situation in Washington, but not as badly as anticipated.
Delegation staffers were down for a visit two weeks ago and their report was far from
rosy. Because of sequestration, NIH funding went from 16% to 14% which is not that
big of a deal. Our new president is fully engaged in research. He does not come from a
research background, but he is very interested in all the research being done at USM and
is very serious about us maintaining our position as one of the premiere research
universities in the State of Mississippi. Dr. Cannon was quite pleased that Dr. Bennett
introduces himself as being president of a research university which, to his knowledge,
no president has done since he has been at USM. That was all he had to report and the
floor was opened for questions.
Dr. Chris Barry asked about the future of seed grants. Dr. Cannon stated that he is in the
middle of analyzing the seed grants. The first round was issued November 1st with
everybody having a year to get some proposals out. He has not yet determined if it has
had an effect. He sent notices to everyone who received a seed grant in June asking for a
progress report, i.e., if they had submitted a proposal, or what their plans were for
submitting a proposal. He is evaluating those responses now. He was surprised that 20%
of the people awarded grants failed to claim them. He sent notices that they were
awarded a $2000 grant to use on anything they wanted to develop a proposal and they did
not claim them up to 8-9 months later. This was very perplexing to Dr. Cannon.
However, he is still optimistic. He did not know for sure if they would be offered again,
but stated that everyone would be notified if seed grants are offered again and he
projected a notice date of November 1-15, 2013 for the 1st round and April 15, 2014 for
the second round. The final analysis on the current seed grants is as follows: 24 of 26
applications were funded this past November and 22 of 23 applications were funded in
April 2013. That is a pretty good size investment which he feels it could have resulted in
a pretty significant return. He is optimistic because it has worked well at Mississippi
State and several other schools across the country.
Dr. Cannon also reported on the research incentive fund called MIDAS. Last year after
conferring with Faculty Senate, the Council of Deans, and the Academic Leadership
Council on whether a MIDAS modification would be a positive or negative thing, he did
not receive a tremendous amount of strong feelings from groups. Individually, people
benefiting substantially (making $15,000 or more extra) from it were for it, whereas
people who had no opportunity to receive funding from MIDAS because of the type of
grants that they submit are very strongly against it. He expects without a doubt that
changes will be made in MIDAS. He does not expect it to completely go away, but
without a doubt this year the name may change. The reason for the change is that
MIDAS actually costs (not so much the Vice President’s office, because MIDAS is based
on salary recovery for people who buy time out of grants) the university about $300,000 a
year that we could be doing other things with. The question is does it really provide the
desired incentive. Subsequently, every grant that is currently attached to a MIDAS
account is being reviewed and modification is needed. Determination of how to best
modify MIDAS to accomplish the desired objective of bringing in competitive grants and
full F&A or as much as the agency will allow, renewable peer-review type grants. He
welcomes any thoughts from the URC or their constituencies about how they think it
should be done. If you Google faculty research incentives, you will probably find at least
35-36 almost identical to the USM MIDAS program. There are a number of downsides.
On occasion, we run into people who will actually modify their grant budget to maximize
the amount of buyout times thus reducing the amount going to graduate students or other
sources. That is not what we want. However, chairs and deans have to sign off on these
modifications before they come to me and it could be fixed in place. Also several faculty
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candidates said it was a good recruiting tool in their choice to come to USM. However,
the three who actually said that have not submitted a single grant which causes their
argument to lose weight. Any input on making MIDAS better would be appreciated.
3. Update Office of Research Integrity (Sam Bruton) – Dr. Bruton reported that since
last spring, over the summer, work has been done on new policy drafts for IRB and an
IACUC policy which is partially motivated by the Scholarly Misconduct Policy that URC
passed and was approved by Executive Cabinet in May. It mentions violations of human
subjects’ regulations, university policies and animal subject policies as a form of
scholarly misconduct. He wanted to nail down exactly what those policies are and drafts
of those documents will be coming to URC for review.
On IRB, Ms. Betty Ann Morgan, a long-time IRB administrator retired in May and has
been replaced by Ms. Joanne Johnson who is doing a great job. The rollout for the
Conflict of Interest policy was initiated. It seems to have gone well with about 50% of
the faculty completing it by the September 13th deadline. Notices will be sent to the
other 50% with notices to the deans and chairs to encourage better compliance. The
system seems to have worked relatively well. Feedback on the process is welcome, as
surprisingly little or no feedback has been received.
Dr. Bruton was very pleased to announce that research workshops and forums have been
very active and are going well. Ms. Marcia Landen and Dr. Gordon Cannon both spoke
at one last Friday which was well attended and quite successful. Marcia and Chase are at
GCRL next week and are doing one next week at Stennis. Dr. Bruton did a couple of
days in August on the (FCOI) Financial Conflict of Interest rollout. Ms. Jennifer
Downey and Dr. Mike Madson will be doing an IRB workshop in about a week and a
half and have people pre-registered for it. Suggestions for Spring Workshops and
Forums are welcome. Several modules have been built on blackboard. Part of the
Financial Conflict of Interest regulations called for people with PHS grants to have
training in the university’s (FCOI) Financial Conflict of Interest policy. Our module on
blackboard is similar to the city module. We have also built blackboard modules on
Scholarly Misconduct and plagiarism. Suggestions are welcome on how we might utilize
that platform and more educational tools that would be of use and interest. Dr. Rust
asked who had access to the plagiarism module. Dr. Bruton stated that all faculty has
access by logging on to blackboard with your SOAR credentials. All faculty is
automatically enrolled in this “Integrity Assurance Program” where plagiarism
definitions (i.e., how plagiarism differs from copyright) and other examples (humanities,
arts and social sciences) are available as well to help demonstrate the sorts of plagiarism
that you shouldn’t do (examples of patch writing that some of the students get
particularly puzzled about). He was asked about student assignments and said students
could be granted access by request. Students have to be enrolled. If you wanted the
whole class to go through the modules, we are happy to enroll the students in there.
4. Update Office of Research Administration (Marcia Landen) – Ms. Landen reported
that as Dr. Cannon stated, some of our numbers are down, but we are seeing an actual
trend now that we have three (3) months (July-Aug-Sept) of data available. We have
seen an increase in the number of proposals submitted over the same period last year
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which she attributes in some part to all the good faculty hires. Copies of two guidance
documents were distributed. (1) How we will be treating Fixed Price Awards for
Sponsored Projects and (2) How we classify Participant Support costs. After a spring
review of all the university policies, the results were pretty good. Federal guidelines are
followed pretty well. There are some procedural things she noticed that are done
inconsistently or that are not clear to my staff and faculty in general. On Fixed Price
awards (which is a minority of the projects), i.e., a company pays us $10,000 to deliver
some analysis and we can spend the money however we want. This addresses how we
handle it if we overspend or under spend on that project. Participant Support costs are
costs I have noticed sometimes being incorrectly handled. They are also a very small
minority of our costs categories. They are used when we are bringing people in or
putting on a conference/workshop and there are costs associated with that
educational/training event. I think in many cases we have used IRB gift cards on human
subject participation as support costs and those are not. There is a consequence to us
when we miscategorize that because participant support costs do not carry F&A indirect
costs and we are leaving money on the table when we do that. This is guidance, mostly
for my staff, as we are working with faculty, but I wanted you to be aware of it too.
Ms. Landen also tries to keep up with audits of other universities around the country.
The University of Colorado at Denver just got hit on an audit for not following their own
policy. USM is going to have to pay particular attention to our effort certification
policies. In that policy it states that if people don’t certify within 30 days of release of
the certification period, their grant accounts will be frozen. Nobody was found in her
shop that has followed that policy and there is still an outstanding effort certification from
last spring. UCDenver got dinged on that pretty severely and that is one thing we need to
be cleaning up. Auditors are generally a little more lenient as long as we are making
progress in cleaning up whatever is wrong. We are looking at but will not do a major
overhaul because we are waiting on the guidance for the revised federal regulations to
come out. There was a big push last year to revise and combine some of those federal
regulations. There is no point, since the new revised regulations will come out in the next
six months or so.
5. Update Faculty Senate (Lachel Story) – No Report. Dr. Story will continue on with
URC as the Faculty Senate representative bringing with her URC experience. This
experience will benefit the Faculty Senate as well. Ms. Shaw was not sure what the
bylaws were on who the Faculty Senate member is, but felt Dr. Story would be great.
The bylaws will be discussed at a later meeting. Dr. Story did not provide an update, but
did say the bylaws were approved in May.
6. 2013 University Research Awards Day (URAD) (Louis Kyriakoudes)
Dr. Kyriakoudes was unable to attend the meeting but mailed copies of his report to all
members.
He has URAD pretty well under control.

Poster Session (Chris Barry) Dr. Barry reported that he was Dr. Dana Fennell’s
sidekick last year. In the past there were even awards for the best poster in
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different categories which is no small undertaking in terms of getting faculty
across the university to judge those and just with the set up of easels. It was a
nice session last year and well attended. He basically copied the flyer from last
year and changed dates which he confirmed with Dr. Cannon at the beginning of
the meeting that they would be able to pay for printing for the first group. He
asked Dr. Cannon to do whatever he thought was appropriate and reasonable in
regards to the number. He felt in regard to the poster session, if it is not broke,
don’t fix it, but did welcome suggestions and feedback. He plans to contact Dr.
Dana Fennell and get her to tell him what she did as far as getting easels,
certificates etc. Ms. Joyce Shaw told Dr. Barry that Dr. Trent Gould also agreed
to help him.

Displays. Ms. Shaw said a volunteer is still needed to chair displays. She did it
for two years herself. It involves contacting the different colleges to see if they
will put what they typically take to conferences on display. Last year there were
approximately 6-8 in the hall last year. She asked Mr. Jorge Brown if he would
consider doing it if he helped him. He agreed, but said he will be happy to set it
up but cannot be there because he has another commitment on the actual day of
the event.
7. Innovation Awards 2014 (Doug Rust)
Dr. Rust agreed to chair Innovation Awards. Mr. Jorge Brown offered to help him. He
will ask Dr. Lachel Story for direction as well. Ms. Shaw felt it important to get the
students in a research mindset and encourage their participation. Dr. Cannon was
contacted by Ms. Cynthia Easterling and asked if he had a problem with moving the
announcements to Faculty Awards Day instead of Founders Day. He told them he did
not have a problem with it. Ms. Shaw said Founders Day was more for student awards
and the Innovation Awards announcements were tacked on to the end. Moving it to
Faculty Awards Day seems more appropriate. It doesn’t change the URC schedule that
much. We voted at the end of January or early February any way. They need the
information by the 13th of February to meet their required deadline. The faculty
Innovation Award applicant/nominees will need to be notified before Christmas to have
time to put things together. I’m sure Dr. Story will be happy to help you. The document
will just need to have the dates altered because the awards have not changed.
8. New Business - None
9. Old Business
Action Item: Ms. Joyce Shaw will review all the draft minutes to get them in final form.
10. Next meeting: TBD
The October meeting is expected to be geared more towards making sure everything is
prepared for URAD since it is the most important URC event. Ms. Shaw will be out of
town for the last two weeks of October. She will talk to Dr. Kyriakoudes to see if he will
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set up a subcommittee meeting to address URAD, perhaps in a non-physically sitting in a
meeting manner.
Action Item: Ms. Joyce Shaw will ask Dr. Kyriakoudes to set up a URAD subcommittee
meeting
Action Item: Ms. Joyce Shaw will do a doodle poll for the next meeting; perhaps the last
Friday of the month may be agreeable.
11. Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 3:45 pm
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