The Proposal Principal

By Michael Rogers

Every so often, faculty members at Caltech find themselves scurrying around their offices and labs, burrowing through piles of paper, searching frantically for vanished computer files, and cajoling, then pleading with staff and colleagues. On such occasions their well-polished people skills may even start to crack. While there may be various reasons for such displays, one that never fails to prompt them is a looming deadline to submit a funding proposal to a government agency. Richard Seligman experiences that ritual hundreds of times a year, and he rarely sets foot in a lab.

As senior director of Caltech’s Office of Sponsored Research, Seligman’s main job is to monitor, approve, and send off the funding proposals that help faculty pay for the people and equipment they need to pursue their research. He doesn’t write the proposals, but with more than 35 years in the academic grants business, he is quite familiar with the administrative and budgetary aspects of research grant applications. If that makes him sound like a glorified paper pusher or numbers cruncher, in practice he’s more like an experienced financial advisor, looking out for the interests of the faculty and the Institute on the one side, while keeping well informed about the requirements and resources of the funding institutions on the other.

Seligman employed those advisory skills during a recent phone call with Caltech provost Paul Jennings, PhD ’63, over a funding issue that had gone unresolved for months. A Caltech professor had been promised funds from a company whose operations he also planned to study as part of a research project. But the company wanted the professor to sign a nondisclosure agreement prohibiting him from identifying it in his research.

The professor had no problem with that restriction, but Seligman said he was concerned that Caltech could be held liable if the faculty member broke the agreement or if the company perceived him to have done so. “True gifts are few and far between,” Seligman opined to Jennings, before recommending that the professor and the company work out an agreement with no connection to Caltech.

It’s not unusual to find Seligman making critical decisions involving large sums of money, but despite the high stakes involved, Sponsored Research is not exactly a high-energy place to work. It’s all about professionalism and efficiency, and Seligman seems very comfortable in that milieu. On a campus where T-shirts, shorts, and Birkenstocks are the rule rather than the exception, he is usually found in conservative suits, ties, and crisp, white, button-down shirts. His clutter-free office is decorated with family photos and three diplomas testifying that he received his BA from UCLA, his MA from Ohio University, and a doctorate in education from UCLA. Four framed aphorisms hang on the wall behind his desk. Here’s one, a line from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Iolanthe:

“The Law is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent. It has no kind of fault or flaw. And I, my lords, embody the law.”

Despite the implicit sarcasm, the quote makes its point: Proposals to federal funding agencies go by the book or they don’t go at all. If that’s initially frustrating for faculty, it’s the job of Seligman and his six-member staff of grant officers and analysts to help them realize that following the grantor’s regulations is the best way to get financial support.

Says Amnon Yariv, Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and professor of electrical engineering, “Recently, I have found Sponsored Research very useful in making sure that I did what was needed to insure the flow of funds from an ongoing contract. It seems that by disregarding the small print of the proposals and some sloppiness in reporting, my lab ran afoul of some administrators in Washington and ran the risk of losing a fair amount of change. Sponsored Research got on my tail and did not rest till I did what needed to be done. That included a call from Dick Seligman to me. I appreciated that.”

Dick Seligman, in center of above photo, quarterbacks an efficient team in the Sponsored Research office, including (left to right) contract and grant analysts Lucy Molina and Jenny Mercado, associate director David Mayo, and contract and grant officer Gaylene Ursua. Not pictured are Nancy Daneau, senior contract and grant officer, and Lisa Miller, contract and grant analyst.

DEALING WITH DEADLINES

Located in the financial services building on the north side of campus, Seligman’s office is busy throughout the calendar year, but tends to be especially busy between September and December, when most proposal submissions are due. Seligman says, “On any given work day, there is a deadline for some program, and grant awards are received on a daily basis throughout the year.” In the days before e-mail became a ubiquitous form of communication, staff members often had to make mad dashes to send off proposals by express mail on deadline filing days. And on the rare occasion that a proposal failed to reach the funding agency in time, they’d have to make frantic calls to their government sources to get them to accept the proposal.

Often, Seligman and his staff would succeed in getting the agency to accept a tardy proposal. But he recalls one case in which Federal Express delivered the package to the wrong address in Washington, and the key faculty member on the project missed the deadline by one day. Although it was not the investigator’s fault, the agency would not accept the proposal, and Seligman could not persuade it otherwise. The professor’s subsequent attempts to charge Federal Express for the several million dollars he would conceivably have received to fund the research were similarly unsuccessful. In the end, he had to settle for a simple refund of the shipping costs.

But such horror stories are rare these days, now that proposals are usually filed electronically. “There’s still a deadline, but we no longer have to send a pile of paper,” Seligman says. “All you have to do is push the submit button.” That doesn’t mean that there are no more fire drills. Like the average tax filer, many faculty members seem to be wired for procrastination, delaying their submissions until the last minute. “Modern technology has changed the methods we use, but human nature has not changed,” Seligman says.

Seligman recently completed his tenth year running the Caltech Sponsored Research office, and in that time, the volume of proposals has steadily increased. In fiscal year 2005, the Institute submitted 1,030 proposals totaling $735 million, compared to 760 proposals totaling $491 million in fiscal year 2000. Caltech investigators received $235 million in the last fiscal year, compared with $192 million in fiscal year 2000.

“Based on anecdotal experience, our success rate is higher than any other place I know,” Seligman says. “The dollar value of grants per faculty member is higher here than at any other place you could possibly find. It reflects the intensity of research at Caltech.”

It may be the electronic age, but Seligman keeps two years’ worth of proposals on paper in the Sponsored Research file room. William Goddard, PhD ’64, the Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics, is the most prolific investigator in terms of the square footage that his proposals occupy. They take up two shelves in the file room.

FROM BRUIN TO BEAVER

Seligman left UCLA’s sponsored research office in 1996 to come to Caltech. At UCLA—where he had worked for more than 25 years—he managed a staff of 30 people, but UCLA’s faculty is about 10 times larger than the Institute’s, and his office was also responsible for grants and contracts in the medical school. Seligman says that he was eager to join Caltech’s smaller operation so that he could work more closely with investigators in a less bureaucratic environment.

“For someone in my business, coming here and having this job is like having died and gone to heaven for research administration,” Seligman says. “At UCLA, I was several levels removed from researchers. Here I’m very directly involved. When I interviewed for the job, the division chairs told me I’d be a working director and that I couldn’t sit back with my feet on the desk and contemplate. That was fine with me. I consider myself fortunate. I get to be the boss, but I’m not far removed from individual faculty members and research. I get to resolve problems and help to get awards processed and set up.

“For the most part, the Caltech faculty is an extremely sophisticated bunch and well versed in the art of proposal preparation,” Seligman says. That doesn’t mean they don’t need help finding their way through the proposal morass. “Each funding agency has a slightly different way of doing things. It’s difficult to get them to agree on one approach. One of our functions is to understand how each of the major federal agencies works, so we can assist the investigators in making the process as painless as possible. We look at the budget and proposal and try to compare it against the proposal prospectus to make sure all the parts requested are there.”

Seligman makes it clear that his office does not get involved in the parts of a proposal that describe the technology or science. “We are not in a position to have a thorough understanding of the science,” he says. “That’s the division chairman’s job.” At the same time, his office has “to have at least a general understanding of what’s being proposed in order to be effective.”

For example, last year, Caltech staff scientist Ryan McLean submitted a proposal to the Office of Homeland Security for the development of a prototype instrument to detect radiation. Seligman says that while it is the investigator’s responsibility to explain what will be done on the project and what it will cost, the contract is awarded to the Institute, so it is the Institute’s responsibility to review the terms and conditions and to make sure that they are consistent with the Institute’s policies and practices. “There were requirements by Homeland Security that would place restrictions on McLean’s ability to freely publish information, along with restrictions for safeguarding information and on access of the information to foreign nationals,” Seligman says. “Since it was our job to present Caltech’s case as to why these restrictions should not apply, we had to understand what this project was about.” Seligman argued that the project centered on fundamental science, and that it was not necessary for Homeland Security to clamp down so hard on the free flow of information that’s critical to Caltech’s research and education mission. “We were successful, and the restrictions were removed.”

To help improve his office’s liaison work between Caltech and the federal government, which provides most of the Institute’s grants, Seligman represents Caltech on the Federal Demonstration Partnership—a group of university administrators and federal officials who work to streamline grants management by making proposals and awards less burdensome for investigators. For several years, the FDP has been trying to simplify and unify electronic methods of doing business with the federal government, and Seligman cochairs an FDP committee whose “goal is to make sure that the terms and conditions applied to grants are as reasonable as possible and that bureaucratic requirements are kept to a minimum. I get to meet with individuals at federal agencies responsible for grants management. I would like to think that the relationships I’ve developed with agency personnel have benefited Caltech. I don’t think they’ve helped us obtain funding when the proposals wouldn’t otherwise have obtained it, but they do help resolve any outstanding issues once the funding has been provided. Connections help us get to the right person to provide Caltech with the most favorable treatment possible within the rules and regulations. They help us get over the bumps in the road.”

Seligman says that he’s not worried that his committee work to streamline the grants process could one day make him redundant. “There’s plenty of work to be done and, in the case of our office, an extremely small staff to do it,” he says. “Administrative streamlining is the only hope that we’ll be able to keep up with the workload without increasing the size of our staff—something that, in the present budgetary climate, is not very likely.”