Dear Faculty:

This is an important message for all current and future investigators supported by NIH awards or contracts. If you fall within these categories, please read the following message carefully and follow up with OVPR if you have questions.

The NIH has instituted changes in its continuing approach to ensure appropriate allocation of funds and to increase transparency in affiliations and sources of support. These changes pertain to the biographical sketch and “other support” components. NIH is enforcing these changes on all applications, Just-in-Time requests, and Research Performance Progress Reports (RPPRs) as of January 25, 2022. Submissions that do not conform to the new requirements may be returned without review for noncompliance (see NOT-OD-21-073).

Summary of Changes to Biographical Sketch

• The format for non-fellowship biosketches (R-series, K-series, P-series, U-series) now consists of 3 sections:
  • Personal statement
  • Positions
  • Scientific appointments and honors and contribution to science

*Investigators no longer need to include a “Research Support” section in the biosketch.

• The most notable change is the requirement to list all scientific appointments, both domestic and foreign. All paid and unpaid appointments, whether with UConn or another institution, organization, company, or entity are to be included. Scientific appointments include memberships in scientific societies, board memberships, consulting appointments and any affiliations with domestic or foreign entities or governments. These appointments could be full-time, part-time, or voluntary.
• Fellowship biosketches will continue to have an additional section called “Scholastic Performance” which must be completed.

Summary of Changes to “Other Support”

• “Other support” forms must now be electronically signed directly by senior/key personnel, or anyone who is required to submit “other support,” to certify the accuracy of them. This may be done through electronic signature software such as Adobe Pro or DocuSign. The NIH specifies that a typed name or inserting a graphic of a scanned signature (JPEG,  TIFF, GIF, etc.) is not considered an electronic signature. “Other support” submissions must be submitted as a combined flattened PDF after all signatures are obtained. Here, flattening refers to the process of transforming a PDF document to ensure that the data cannot be modified (see below for link to guidance from Sponsored Program Services on flattening a PDF).
• Copies of all foreign contracts, foreign grants, and other foreign agreements specific to foreign appointments, affiliations, and/or employment with a foreign institution must be provided by faculty and other senior personnel. This also includes activities submitted through the faculty consulting approval process. For documents that are written in other languages, a translation into English must also be provided. At this time, it does not appear that awards made to UConn (grants or contracts with the University) need to be provided.
• “Other support” should continue to include all resources, both domestic and foreign, made available to investigators to support their research activities, not just those related to the application. This includes:

• • Sponsored projects, both at UConn or conducted at other entities.
  • In-kind resources in support of an individual’s research program:
    • Personnel (visiting scholars, visiting students that are supported by a non-UConn entity)
    • Space
    • Equipment
    • Materials
    • Supplies
  • Internal UConn Research Awards

• Other research-related engagements or employment, which also includes activities submitted via the faculty consulting approval process.
• External consulting when an investigator will be involved in the design, conduct, or reporting of the research or when publications may result from the activity.
  *The NIH reserves the right to request copies of any consulting agreements.

·       The NIH must be notified immediately of any undisclosed “other support” that was missing at the point of Just-in-Time submission. The NIH has stated that this cannot wait until the next RPPR is due.

Additional information is available on the SPS OVPR website, see links below. Please contact Tracy Bourassa (tracy.bourassa@uconn.edu) in Sponsored Program Services at UConn Storrs and the regional campuses, or for UConn Health, Paul Hudobenko (hudobenko@uchc.edu).

Please also see:

Storrs and Regional Campuses

• SPS Information on NIH Other Support
• SPS Guidance on Flattening a PDF

UConn Health

·       SPS information on NIH Other Support

·       SPS Guidance on Flattening a PDF

NIH Resources

• NIH Other Support
• NIH Other Support FAQs
• NIH Biosketch Format Pages, Instructions and Samples
• NIH Biographical Sketch FAQs

 

With regards,
Carl Lejuez
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs 

Radenka Maric
Vice President for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Dear Colleagues,

Since I started as your provost over 18 months ago, a primary goal in our office has been to prioritize how we support our people. This goal touches nearly every aspect of our operations, from communications planning and strategy, to the structure of our vice provost roles, to our partnerships within the schools and colleges and across the University. We have been retooling our approaches in several areas, including new faculty engagement and academic leadership development, as just a couple of examples.

As we undertake these efforts, it’s critical we do so in a way that is informed by the needs and input of those we serve. One such source that will be very valuable in our efforts is the COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey. The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), a program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a research-practice partnership and network of peer institutions dedicated to improving outcomes in faculty recruitment, development, and retention.

In partnership with COACHE, we administered an anonymous survey to our faculty in spring 2020 at the start of my time here at UConn. Following that, the Provost’s Office worked with faculty representatives to collaborate on understanding the survey results and to look at areas in which we can improve. The data is also benchmarked against a small set of comparable institutions, allowing us to see specific strengths and weaknesses in comparison to peers. We will next participate in the survey in 2025.

We hope you will engage with this data to familiarize yourself with our strengths and weaknesses as reported by you and your colleagues. And we also hope this data will encourage dialogue about opportunities to best support faculty at UConn. I invite you to join one of our upcoming sessions to learn more about these results (sign-up information below).

The COACHE survey results provide really valuable information about the experiences of our faculty. The results indicated important areas of strengths and weakness. Regarding the latter, we obtained valuable information to help us understand less favorable perceptions of mentoring and the extent to which under-represented minority faculty find the University a less welcoming environment than their fellow faculty.

The full results of the survey are available on a SharePoint site via the Office for Institutional Research and you can log into this site here.

To provide an overview of the results and to answer any questions, we are holding virtual workshops at two different times. Sign-up information is available at the links below (requires NetID login).

• Monday, November 22, 4 to 5 p.m.
• Thursday, December 2, 12 to 1 p.m.

The presentation will be led by Phillip Hyman, MPA ’22, Provost’s Office Policy Intern, with Vice Provost Gladis Kersaint and Director of Academic Policy and Faculty Affairs Sarah Croucher available to answer questions.

We look forward to engaging with you on these important results.

Sincerely,
Carl

Carl Lejuez
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dear UConn Faculty,

One of the highest honors that we bestow on our faculty is the title of Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor. We are now seeking nominations for this honor to recognize UConn faculty who excel in research, teaching, and service.

As you may recall, we revised our nomination process last year to broaden the diversity of nominees as well as to redistribute the effort involved in the nomination process. Previously, our procedure required all nominees to solicit external letters in their application materials. As we did last year, we are splitting the process into two phases. In the initial phase, nominations will not include external letters. The committee will review the materials of initial phase nominees and invite a select group to advance as finalists, at which point external letters will be requested.

The newly instituted changes are intended to help applicants understand if they have reached the finalists pool, as well as focus the effort of soliciting letters for the nominations most likely to advance in a given year.

I strongly encourage you to talk to colleagues whom you feel might meet the criteria of excellence in research, teaching, and service, and who have spent at least 10 years of their career at UConn.

The deadline for nomination materials in the first phase is Wednesday, November 24. More information is available on the Provost’s Office website. If you have questions about submitting materials, please reach out to provost@uconn.edu.

After first-phase reviews, the committee will select a smaller pool of finalists, who will be notified before the end of December. These finalists should then solicit letters of recommendation, including those from outside of UConn. Letters and any other materials requested for this pool of finalists will be due by February 18, 2022.

Candidates selected to receive the title of Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor will be awarded this distinction at the April meeting of the Board.

Sincerely,
Michael

Dear Colleagues,

The middle of the semester is always a good time to assess progress personally and for our students. As we did in the spring at this time, I wanted to share a few resources for all instructors to utilize in their instructional plans, as an opportunity to review your and your students’ trajectory through the end of the semester. I appreciate the support of the Senate Executive Committee and leaders in the undergraduate and graduate student senates in pulling these materials together.

Formative feedback

Mid-term formative feedback surveys can be a useful tool for instructors to hear anonymously from their students on course materials, lectures, assessments, and other elements of course design. We encourage all instructors to implement a mid-term formative feedback survey in their courses. These surveys can be valuable resources to make mid-course adjustments, as well as to broaden student engagement. The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness offer resources to develop and distribute formative feedback surveys. In all cases, these are designed to be private (for instructors’ personal use only, not to be shared with department heads or other administrators). If you are interested in utilizing formative feedback, you can begin with a resource guide prepared by CETL.

Mid-term grades

Sharing mid-term grades with your students is another important part of reviewing student progress, which can have positive impacts on your students’ engagement in coursework. University Senate By-Laws state that by the end of the sixth week of the semester, instructors shall submit midterm grades for students in 1000- and 2000-level courses who have earned less than a C, or U, or N grade up to that point.

In these challenging times, however, I encourage all instructors to share mid-term grades with their students in all levels. This feedback on progress will help students make adjustments and access resources as necessary to stay on track academically, and assess their trajectory in the course to make decisions earlier on potential withdrawals or pass-fail designations in courses. This is also an opportunity to refer students of concern to academic support resources like the Academic Achievement Center (AAC).

We are sharing guides here with different options to submit grades to PeopleSoft. Informing your students of their grade or posting mid-term grades in HuskyCT is helpful, but posting grades in PeopleSoft is necessary to ensure this information regarding student progress is available to staff at the University who provide academic support. Grades can be submitted beginning on Monday, October 4 through Thursday October 28. Instructors can submit grades three different ways into StudentAdmin:

• Manually into Student Admin utilizing these instructions
• Via an Excel file utilizing these instructions
• Via a direct feed from HuskyCT utilizing these instructions

For any instructors who have yet to administer any assessments in their course by which to determine a mid-term grade, now is a good time to administer an assessment to ensure you and your students know how they are progressing in the course and mastering the material.

Finally, I want to encourage faculty to be as considerate as possible, and exercise as much flexibility as possible, regarding make-ups for students who may report being ill.  Students are urged not to attend class when they are feeling ill and this health precaution extends to scheduled exams, as well.

As always, thank you for all you are doing.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey

Jeffrey Shoulson
Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Dear Colleagues: 

Several years ago, the University Senate passed a by-law change regarding final assessments in all undergraduate classes. The change enabled all faculty and instructors in our undergraduate courses to choose a variety of assessments of student work, stating that the final assessment does not necessarily need to be an exam. The change also eliminated the approval of the department and of the dean of the school or college for faculty who choose not to offer a final examination.

If you are not delivering a final exam in Fall 2021, we ask that you fill out a brief form to notify the Registrar that you are opting out. The form and instructions are available by clicking here. We are asking for those who use another method of assessment (portfolios, projects, etc.) to let us know so that the room and/or time may be available for other instructors during the assessment period. It is also important that instructors recognize that due dates for these alternative forms of final assessment should not fall on days designated as reading days. As always, all due dates should be indicated on the syllabus at the beginning of the semester.

Many of our instructors have used other forms of assessment that align more purposefully with their intended learning objectives. Assessment formats can include individual or group-based strategies, e.g.  projects, portfolios, papers, team-based work, creative works, performances, presentations and other assessments in lieu of final exams. 

Finally, please note that it is prohibited by Senate By-Laws to give your final assessments during the last week of classes. Exams during the last week of classes puts an undue strain on students who are trying to attend and participate in their other courses during the last week of classes.  

Sincerely,
Jeffrey

Jeffrey Shoulson
Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Dear UConn Faculty and Staff,

We’re excited to share that our career fair will return to an in-person format again this fall, and we’re asking for your help in making sure students are aware of this opportunity. This is a noteworthy occasion to return to an in-person career fair, following nearly two years on hiatus due to the pandemic.

The Center for Career Development is hosting the in-person career fair at Gampel next week, Tuesday, September 21 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. We currently have 102 employers representing all industries and hiring all majors that are planning to attend the event and hire UConn students for internships and full-time roles.

We know there are also many employers working and recruiting virtually; to accommodate their needs we’re hosting a virtual career fair the following week, September 28, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. via our online career platform, Handshake. We have more than 100 employers registered for the virtual fair, again representing all industries and all majors. Students are able to conduct 10-minute 1:1 sessions and attend half-hour info sessions in this virtual setting.

Please help us make these events a success by encouraging your students to attend both fairs; there will be different employers at each event. Many of you know that the majority of our employers are hiring now for next summer’s interns and full-time staff, and will have their hiring completed by Thanksgiving. Please share this information with your students. Students across all of our campuses are welcome to attend both events.

Your support of our students in their career exploration is deeply appreciated.

Sincerely,
Michael

Michael Bradford
Vice Provost for Faculty, Staff and Student Development

Dear UConn Community,

I am writing to share an important decision that was approved by the University Senate to change the by-laws regarding Pass-Fail and Withdraw deadlines.

At the Sept. 13 meeting of the University Senate, the Senate Scholastic Standards Committee (SSC) brought forth a proposal to extend, align, and standardize the Pass-Fail and Withdraw deadlines. Their proposal sought to permanently change the deadlines for both Pass-Fail and Withdraw to occur at the same time and later in the semester, to the end of the 11th week of the semester. This proposal was approved by the University Senate, and takes effect immediately.

This means that starting in the Fall 2021 semester and going forward, Pass-Fail and Withdraw deadlines are at the end of the 11th week of the semester. The Pass-Fail policy applies to undergraduate students only; the Withdraw policy applies to undergraduate and graduate students.

In making this proposal, the SSC reviewed the three semesters in which the University extended deadlines in response to the pandemic (Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021). They consulted with numerous administrative and student service offices, as well as student partners to review how the extended deadlines affected students and processes related to these extended deadlines.

The SSC acknowledged in its proposal that moving back the Pass-Fail deadline from the 2nd to the 11th week is a change from the original intent of this grading option, which was primarily to allow students to take risks and explore topics without worry about low-grade impacts on GPA. The extended deadline allows for not only this original intent, but also for students to monitor their progress within a course and convert to Pass-Fail based on their changing circumstances.

The end of the 11th week deadline was determined as the most appropriate timing to allow for students to have sufficient graded assessments to make an informed decision about whether a Withdraw or Pass-Fail is appropriate for the course, for advisors to meet with and counsel students about such decisions, and for the Registrar’s Office to process these designations by students.

Consistent with past practice, SSC’s proposal limited the number of times that a student can make a Pass-Fail grade change. Specifically, students who convert a Pass-Fail and then revert the course back to a graded basis cannot again convert the course back to Pass-Fail. The proposal does not in any way change the limitations on which Pass-Fall can be applied, nor the number of courses to which Pass-Fail can be applied.

The new by-law language is copied below for reference:

II.B.10 Academic Advising and Registration. Adding, Dropping, or Withdrawing from a Course

Students may Drop courses before the end of the tenth day of classes without transcript notations. After the tenth day of classes and through the eleventh week of the semester, a student may Withdraw from one course (for any reason) with permission from the student’s advisor. Students seeking to Withdraw from more than one course after the tenth day of classes or seeking to  Withdraw from a course after the eleventh week of the semester must get approval from the student’s advisor and from the Dean or designee of the school or college in which the student is enrolled. Approvals are given only for extenuating circumstances beyond the student’s control; poor academic performance is not an extenuating circumstance. Any course Withdrawn from after the first ten days of classes will receive a ‘W’ on the transcript. Exceptions to transcript notations can be made only by the Provost or designee. For courses taught outside of the fall and spring semesters, these deadlines will be adjusted in a pro-rated fashion by the Registrar.

II.E.3.b Pass-Fail Option.

A student who has earned at least 26 credits and is not on scholastic probation may elect a maximum of 12 credits (not including credits on P/F recorded in spring 2020) to be distributed over not more than three courses, to be recorded as ‘P’ for Pass or ‘F’ for Fail on his or her permanent record. Courses taken Pass-Fail may only be used as electives; they may not be used to satisfy general education, school/college, major or minor requirements. Students who are selecting a course for the Pass-Fail option or want to convert a Pass-Fail back to a graded basis must do so by the eleventh week of the semester. Students who convert to a Pass-Fail and then revert the course back to a graded basis cannot again convert the course back to a Pass-Fail. Students seeking to put a course on Pass-Fail after the eleventh week of the semester must get approval from the student’s advisor and from the Dean or designee of the school or college in which the student is enrolled.  Approvals are given only for extenuating circumstances beyond the student’s control; poor academic performance is not an extenuating circumstance. For courses taught outside of the fall and spring semesters, these deadlines will be adjusted in a pro-rated fashion by the Registrar.

I am grateful to the thoughtful and hard-working members of the Senate Scholastic Standards Committee who pulled together this proposal, the leadership of USG who provided a strong voice for students throughout the process, and of course our senators who considered these issues from the perspectives of faculty, students, and staff.

Sincerely,
Carl

Carl Lejuez
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to let you know about updates to the faculty consulting website, found at https://consulting.uconn.edu/

On the updated website, you can find your submitted requests and submit new requests from the “dashboard” link on the top menu, or from the link to “view your dashboard of submitted requests and/or to submit a new request” found on the homepage. The form itself has not changed, only the website has been updated.

Under the “Getting Started” options you can now find a comprehensive introductory guide to filling out the form, information about different activities that are undertaken as part of the faculty consulting program, and more general information related to consulting.

Our FAQ section has been significantly updated and includes questions and answers for faculty submitting requests, and for department heads, deans, or equivalent who are approvers.

We hope that this will be a useful resource to all those navigating the faculty consulting request process. Please get in touch with the appropriate Faculty Consulting Office representative if you have any feedback or any other questions related to the faculty consulting program.

Best regards,

Dr. Gladis Kersaint, Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives

Dr. Sarah Croucher, Director of Academic Policy and Faculty Affairs (Faculty Consulting Office, Storrs/Regionals)

Dr. Jody Terranova, Director of Faculty Consulting, UConn Health Center (Faculty Consulting Office, UCH