“SAM is an acronym for Sponsored Awards Management on the one hand,” said Harris Pastides, vice president for research and health sciences, “but more importantly, SAM is a ‘ship-turning’ administrative commitment to our faculty and their external funding activity needs.”

An immediate and highly visible indication of that commitment is SAM replacing SPAR (Sponsored Programs and Research) as the name for the University’s research awards management office, Pastides said. The name change reflects the functional integration of proposal development services and the faculty support components of the post-award services provided by Contract and Grant Accounting.

But SAM is much more than an organizational name change, say faculty members serving on an advisory committee established to ensure faculty contributions to SAM’s development and implementation.

“SAM is a full re-engineering of the organization,” said Mike Wargovich, SAM Advisory Committee chair and School of Medicine professor. “It starts with a new way of doing business. SAM will allow faculty researchers to spend more time on their research by providing them with real service; the kind that will free them from much of the administrative burden related to managing their funded projects.”

“USC’s volume of research activity has grown steadily for the past two decades, but improvements to the infrastructure serving researchers have not kept pace,” said Harry Ploehn, a chemical engineering professor and member of the SAM Advisory Committee. That has led to information bottlenecks, and, too often, inefficient administration of research grants and frustrated faculty and staff.

Under SAM, grant administrators will work in teams with Contract and Grant Accounting staff to assist faculty researchers from project proposal to project close.

“Faculty members engaged in sponsored research deserve definitive assistance with their grants. If they are frustrated by an administrative system, then they are distracted from their important work,” Pastides said. “They should always be able to call and get the answers to their questions; but better yet, the support system has to make it possible for them to access the administrative and financial information they need when they need it.”

To that end, SAM staff also will assist and train departmental business managers to become more knowledgeable and capable administrators.
“We want timely, accurate, and knowledgeable assistance to be the standard for service provided to faculty by all levels of university administration,” Pastides said. “A leading research institution simply cannot afford to provide its faculty anything less.”

The creation of SAM dovetails with the introduction earlier this year of USCERA (USC Electronic Research Administration), a Web-based program that allows faculty to submit research proposals online. In June, more than 90 percent of grant proposals were submitted through USCERA.

USCERA is being continuously upgraded and will soon include a searchable database of research projects and publications submitted by University faculty. Also in the works is a system for providing summarized grant financial statements designed by faculty for faculty use. These improved statements would make it much easier for faculty to stay abreast of their research awards and avoid costly mistakes, Wargovich said.

“SAM is nothing short of a complete cultural change when it comes to our administrative commitment to faculty and their research needs,” said Pastides, “and it will offer a daily demonstration of USC’s institutional commitment to excellence through change.”

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