Get to know our Research Administration staff.
A Chicago-native, Karen joined the University of Arizona in 2007 and has been working in the UAHS Research Administration unit since its inception in 2014. Before joining our team in Arizona, she worked in research administration for five years at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Karen completed her undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa society and then went on to attain her MA in English from Simmons College in Boston, MA.
Currently, Karen is a Research Administrator who specializes with pre-award procedures and supports investigators with sponsored research submissions and grant management. She is incredibly knowledgeable on research proposal processes, specifically funding proposals with the National Institutes of Health, and she takes great joy in her job and providing sound advice, strategy, support and service to UAHS researchers.
Karen’s Tips for Landing Research Funding
Start the Process Early
As painful as it may seem, drafting your proposals as early as possible can make a significant difference in your final submission. There will always be bumps along the road – minor bumps if you’re lucky, major ones if you’re not – but no matter what the process will always take a little longer than you might have initially expected. Consider your proposal as a mechanism with several moving parts. Every so often you’ll come across a broken part, a missing piece in your proposal, which can hold-up all of the other pieces in the mechanism, or hold-up your proposal. Drafting your application as early as possible allows time to make sure that all of the pieces will fit together perfectly.
Use Your Resources
When developing a funding proposal, why not use all of the resources that are available to you? Karen recommends reaching out to these two vital resources: UAHS Research Administration unit and your campus colleagues.
At Research Administration we can help set you up with a checklist of requirements for your proposal, prepare an overview of the submission process and provide you with workflows and grant-specific requirements (i.e., documents needed, page limits, submission rules), make sure that the grant is a good fit for you, help keep you on track when submitting larger proposals, and connect you with even more funding opportunities. Individuals who are interested in pursuing potential funding opportunities are encouraged to come visit the Research Administration office.
Another significant contributor to the success of a grant, as Karen has learned in her more than ten years of administrative research experience, is the review process. She recommends that researchers who plan to submit a grant proposal allow themselves enough time to have their proposal reviewed closely by another colleague. This way inconsistencies can be caught and revised before the proposal is sent off to the funding agency.
If you have questions for Karen or would like to set up a time to meet, contact her at (520) 626-4317 or grinfeld@email.arizona.edu.