The Institutional Programs Office (IPO) provides administrative and strategic support of major research projects. This includes major infrastructure awards and other research initiatives.
The IPO manages the full cycle of major federal, provincial and regional research awards. These typically include awards offered by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF) and Pacific Economic Development Canada (PacifiCan). Other awards the IPO has managed include large scale institutional research projects such as the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC), the Canada 150 programs (C150) and the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE).
The IPO services available to the UBC community are summarized below.
The IPO administers, reviews and submits all CFI and BCKDF applications on behalf of UBC researchers:
Prior to submission, the IPO will arrange, for most applications and funding programs:
- Consultations and workshops to help with developing applications;
- Coordination of peer review and criteria review;
- Support for budget development;
- Full financial review;
- Arrangement of signatures and letters of support from the appropriate dean(s);
- Submission of the CFI and BCKDF–Step 1 applications and completion of the BCKDF–Step 2 application on the researcher's behalf
Once the CFI and BCKDF decisions have been made, the IPO will set up meetings with the project leaders to outline the next steps for project implementation.
Through the full cycle of the CFI grant, IPO staff will lead the project leaders through:
- Award finalization and Project/Grant (PG) set up
- Detailed financial reporting and CFI audit support
- CFI Project Progress Reports (PPRs)
- Project amendment requests
- Installation of CFI-funded equipment and labs to UBC sites
- Addition of CFI-funded equipment to CFI online tools to promote equipment sharing and collaboration
- Set up, administration and reporting on the Infrastructure Operating Funds (IOF) that accompany a CFI award.
The IPO team will employ a number of different models for financial management support for PacifiCan funds and other large-scale projects or centres. This may include embedded staff within a centre to take care of the financial administration of the project, or providing the support of centralized IPO staff to support processing financial transactions, provide budget forecasting, financial reporting and audit preparation.
The IPO also includes the VPRI Budget Team who provides financial management and strategic support to the Vice-President, Research & Innovation units.