CARES Pre-Award Team provides pre-award grant support to faculty, staff

Are you in the process of looking for funding and need professional and technical support to put together a strong proposal? If so, look no further than the CARES Pre-Award Team.

The College of Agriculture [and Life Sciences] Research Excellence Support (CARES) Pre-Award Team was formed to strengthen research development and proposal support for CALS faculty and staff in a funding environment that is increasingly competitive and increasingly complex and cross- or trans-disciplinary.

The team provides assistance with:

• reviewing solicitations,
• providing checklists and templates,
• developing budgets,
• initiating gold sheets and cardinal sheets,
• helping with nontechnical aspects of a proposal,
• uploading proposals to various submission portals, such as Cayuse and Fastlane, and
• seeing the proposal process through to submission.

Each of the CARES team coordinators supports one or more specific departments within CALS. Team members can assist CALS faculty and staff outside of their primary department, as needed.

“The team serves pre-award needs across the entire college by backing up each other during busy times and leave periods, and working together as needed to support large, complex, inter-institutional proposals, and college-wide initiatives,” said Ásrún Ýr Kristmundsdóttir, CARES Team leader.

For dually administered departments, the CARES team supports all faculty and staff in both colleges.

The team encourages faculty and staff to seek assistance as soon as possible in the proposal process and to communicate early and often.

“Faculty should contact their CARES coordinator as soon as they start to think about applying for funding,” Kristmundsdóttir said. “The sooner the CARES team is involved, the more assistance we can provide.”

The CARES team can be contacted any time by emailing cares-team@iastate.edu or by contacting your CARES team coordinator listed below.

The CARES team supports all faculty and staff in the following departments/units:

• Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering
• Agricultural Education & Studies
• Animal Science
• Center for Agricultural and Rural Development
• Economics
• Entomology
• Food Science and Human Nutrition
• Natural Resource Ecology and Management
• Horticulture
• Plant Pathology and Microbiology
• Sociology 

Other CALS departmental support include:

• Agronomy - Michelle Miller – mlmllr@iastate.edu
• CALS and Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty and staff in the departments of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology; Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology; Genetics, Development and Cell Biology; and Statistics are supported by the LASER team, lasers@iatate.edu.

Who is your CARES team contact?