Pre-Award Administration

The Office of Research Services Pre-Award Administration team facilitates the grant application and award negotiation process for faculty and staff researchers at Penn. The team provides support by serving as subject matter experts, reviewing proposals and submissions, negotiating and accepting awards and subawards, and performing non-financial post-award functions such as no-cost extensions and re-budgeting requests. The team also supports material transfer and non-monetary agreements related to research.

The Pre-Award team manages the Research Inventory System (RIS), which is the University’s system for agreements that don’t typically involve funding (i.e. Material Transfer Agreements and Collaboration Agreements) or the funding is leaving the University (i.e. Subawards).

Penn allows a limited number of schools and departmental staff to serve as Authorized Organization Representatives (AORs) for the university. Resources and training materials for AORs external to the Office of Research Services can be found in the link below.

Pre-Award staff are assigned to support your work based on university ORG and department. You can find your assigned contact person on our Staff Directory. You can also directly contact the Director of Pre-Award Administration, Ashley Del Bianco, at stoudt@upenn.edu or 215-898-3966.