Abstract

The AMBER Centre has a successful track record in pre award support to European funding programmes. However, due to the way the centre is structured, researchers were left to manage funded projects by themselves. This post-award support gap became increasingly apparent as the compliance and administrative procedures from granting authorities increased over the past decade. In 2023 the pre-award team proposed a new initiative to implement a project manager role to support consortium based HEU projects coordinated by Amber PIs. This submission will explore how this has closed the pre and post award loop, leading to
Dedicated project management support
Support across the entire project life cycle
Improved research proposals at the pre award stage
A more integrated research support team.

AMBER is the Irish national Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research Centre. The Centre hosts approximately 90 PIs and their teams. The core staff of the centre includes 2.5FTE pre-award funding mangers. In the last 10 years we have received over €60M in HEU funding. However, once the proposal is successful, there has been no cohesive post award support for PIs. As success in HEU has grown there has been recognition of the need for professional post award support for coordinators. Particularly to de-risk (a) the increasingly complex compliance landscape of HEU grant management and (b) the unwillingness of PI’s to coordinate such bureaucratically dense projects. In this presentation we will showcase the evolution of this new role and the improvement it has made to our professional support services.
We will present the benefits and challenges this has entailed including the following learning outcomes:
Making a case to management for increased team size / post award gap
Breaking down silos - New processes linking pre and post award supports.
The funding model for post award support
Efficiencies and challenges in supporting multiple HEU projects.
Impact on our RMA services

Overall, this has closed many gaps in our supports, closing the loop and leading to better proposals. More PIs want in on the action now and are more willing to coordinate. An example of how success bree