Receiving funding

When you find out that you are being funded there will be a number of things that you will need to do. Assuming that you work in a university, when you get funding for your research you will need to contact the research administration department (or a research administrator in your department), and they should be able to tell you most of the things that you need to do.  It is also useful to get advice from your line manager or another experienced researcher who knows the local systems in your institution. It is likely that you will need to do some or all of the following:

• Sort out a contract between your funder and your home institution
• Sort out any other contracts that you will need to recruit staff or subcontractors to your study.
• Find out what permission and approval you will need to apply for, and start preparing your applications. This includes applying for ethics approval.
• Set up financial administration for the study (e.g. establish budget codes so that you and other researchers on the project can claim costs)— your institution’s finance department should have procedures for doing this.
• Depending upon your institutions’ insurance requirements you may need to do a risk assessment for the study.
• Do you need to set up any other frameworks for support, such as a project advisory group or project steering group?  Do you have a supervisor or mentor for the work?  Have you promised to do that as a condition of funding?  What do you need to do to put that in place?