is organized by the NCAR Professional Development Committee. And this session is going to be focusing on internal NCAR UCP policies and protocols. And we have three speakers for you today. Anna Thomas, who's a contracts manager in UCAR Contracts Department. Christina Mikulski, who's a CGD project scientist. And Valerie Cork, who's a proposal operations manager at NCAR Budget and Planning. So welcome to all three of you, Anna, Christina, and Valerie.  But first, I just wanted to share the series schedule with everyone. So this is a six session, six sessions in the series. And we're on session three, so halfway there. The first session was an overview. And the last session that we had was on grant organization procedures and policies. So we had representatives from NSF and NOAA. And those sessions are recorded. So if you missed them, we're going to share the link to the recording with you. And you should have email invites for the upcoming sessions as well. And here's the structure of the session. We're going to start with just looking at the topics and the goals for this session. And then I'm going to pass it on to our three speakers. Valerie Cork is going to talk about funding opportunities at NCAR for postdocs. And Anna Thomas is going to talk about transferring grants and contracts to external organization. And Christina Mikulski is going to share with us her journey from postdoc to NCAR project scientists. And after we've heard from our speakers, we're going to have the Q&A session, which is going to be moderated by Mariana. And we're going to end with closing thoughts from our three speakers. So here's the session topics and goals. We're hoping to touch upon some of these topics, opportunities and restrictions for postdocs and applying to grants while they're at NCAR, funding requirements for project scientists, soft money, pursued responsibilities and strategies. And we're going to also hear a little bit about internal timelines for proposal submission to agencies because internal timelines can be a little bit different to external timelines and then transferring grants to external institutions. And so now I'm going to pass it on to Valerie Cook, who's going to talk about funding opportunities at NCAR. Valerie's been with us in the other two sessions as well. So welcome back Valerie and thank you. Thank you, it's great to be back and thank you for inviting me again. And I'll just start off by saying that my presentation is going to come across as very much rural driven. So please bear with me. I just figured it was good for everybody to understand our cooperative agreement requirements and some of the other requirements that NCAR scientists have when submitting proposals for external funding. A little bit about myself, I've been with NCAR for 18 years now. I have been working in the NCAR directorate that entire time, focused on pre-award administration. I also have about nine years of experience in post-award administration at several other universities. So I've really enjoyed my career here at NCAR and I love helping scientists navigate a lot of the rules that we have around here. Not only do you have all of these guidelines that you have to follow when you're submitting your proposal with each of the sponsoring agencies, but a lot of internal things to navigate as well. So, next slide. I'm gonna talk about our cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. As many of you know, NCAR is a FFRDC, a federally funded research and development center and we are sponsored by the National Science Foundation and we are managed by UCAR. And as a result of that arrangement, we do have a cooperative agreement with NSF and within that cooperative agreement, there are sections that pertain to how we are to manage proposals within the institution. And I forgot to put the link on here, but the cooperative agreement is available to all UCAR staff on the contracts website. So we can provide that link in a later time or maybe Anna can grab it now and put it in the chat. So the cooperative agreement with NSF really is the guiding document that shapes many of our policies, procedures and guidelines relevant to proposal submissions and then many other processes here at UCAR, but proposal submissions is one of those. So I pulled out some quotes from the cooperative agreement to kind of walk through. And first off, it talks about that it may be appropriate for NCAR staff and facilities to be used on other projects that contribute to the advancement of atmosphere, geospace and other sciences. So that provides the opportunity for NCAR scientists to submit proposals for external funding. But there are guidelines with those proposals that we submit. So all of our proposals must support the mission of NCAR and particularly we are looking at, you know, making sure our proposals are aligned with the NCAR strategic priorities and your lab priorities. Our activities must not have a negative impact on the base program. So kind of what that means is, you know, we get a large sum of funding to support our NSF based program and we don't want activities that would deviate from our strategic priorities on our base program. So activities should be aligned with the base program or with our strategic priorities. Next slide please. The cooperative agreement also states that we should not utilize staff or facilities in a way that would create an unfair advantage on the university community's ability to obtain funding. So a lot of our proposals that we submit are competitive with the university community and we go through a very elaborate process every year and review every single proposal to ensure that the facilities or staff that we're using do not create an unfair advantage. So things that might create an unfair advantage would be a senior scientist submits a proposal to DOE and they don't wanna charge DOE for their time on the project instead they wanna co-sponsor it from their base program. Thus it has the appearance that it costs less for NCAR to conduct the work than it may for a university who needs to request that salary support on their project. So that may be considered an unfair advantage. So we're looking at those kinds of things when we review proposals. It could also be situations where maybe we're using our high performance computing large allocations of that and you're competing with the university member who does not have access to high performance computing. So there's thresholds that we've established most staff can co-sponsor their time up to 15% on projects without it being an issue and then most people can co-sponsor high performance computing without it being an issue. We look at each and every proposal before they're submitted. In addition, the cooperative agreement states that we are to have the community conduct a review of our proposals or non-unusf proposals valued over 300K. So that's another thing that my office manages each and every year is that we work with a team of six university members that rotate on and off the panel. And they conduct a review of those proposals we've submitted the prior year and they are reviewing those to ensure that we did not compete unfairly. So that's a very different process than the universities have. This is not a peer review. It's not a review of the science. They are focused just on whether or not we're competing unfairly with the community. And all of our reports out from the panel have been positive throughout the year. So in my 18 years here, we haven't had any issues with our proposals. So that's why we go through a detailed review before they're submitted. In addition, the cooperative agreement states that NSF will monitor use of our NCAR staff and facilities on external funding. I do provide NSF with a report every month of our proposals that we've submitted, our sponsorship efforts, et cetera. And NSF also has access into our proposal database and they can look at our proposals at any time. Another item in the cooperative agreement that may be of interest is that we are not allowed to compete on federal announcements that would result in a federal contract. So most federal agencies will issue either a grant or a cooperative agreement or a contract if the proposal is awarded. And we do have a regulation that we cannot compete on those announcements that would result in a contract. We are required to notify NSF prior to formalizing any collaborative agreements. And that is where the monthly report comes in that I sent to NSF so that they receive that prior notification of all of our agreements. Next slide, please. And then there's some language in the cooperative agreement that does talk about our proposals to NSF and NSF AGS. And we are required to obtain written permission from the NSF program officer and must inform the NSF cognizant program officer prior to submitting any proposals to NSF AGS. Again, as I mentioned earlier, we're supposed to maintain a database of all of our proposals and written commitments. This does include unfunded collaboration. So if you are asked by a university member to maybe do some data analysis on their project, but they cannot fund you and they are asking you to write a letter of collaboration, we need to know about that. So please reach out to your supervisor and or LCPO administrator if you get those types of requests. As I mentioned before, NSF will be granted access to that database. And then the database includes a lot of basic information about the proposals such as the title, PI, period of performance, the sponsor, the dollar amount we're requesting, a copy of the budget, a copy of the full proposal that was submitted to the sponsor. And then in addition, there's some additional questions that NSF has asked us to respond to. So we do have a separate process within our proposal database that we call the NCAR criteria. And we're asking for information such as how does that proposal adhere to the mission of NCAR? What facilities are you using? How do you justify that the use of these facilities doesn't create an unfair advantage? Why are we asking for outside funding? What is that impact of the proposal on our base program involvement of the university community in our proposals? And then if we do not have any university collaborators, why not? Next slide, please. So that is a lot of information just on the cooperative agreement. And if I'm not attaining to time, somebody please let me know. You're fine for now, Valerie. All right. So next I wanna talk about the NSF proposal eligibility, particularly when we look at the NSF PAPG, the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide. So within that document, there are eligibility guidelines for FFRDCs. Their guidance does say that they typically do not support activities by scientists employed by federal agencies or other FFRDCs. And but under unusual circumstances, FFRDCs can submit proposals to NSF if they need certain exceptions, meaning that we can provide unique contributions to the community or to NSF. And in a lot of cases we can justify that. I'm seeing more and more with the NSF particular announcements that are posted on their websites that they are limiting submissions to just universities and nonprofit organizations. And they do not typically open it up to FFRDCs. So I am usually contacting the program managers and asking whether or not NCARP could at least participate as a sub-awardee next slide. And I think, okay, I kind of just talked about that. So in our communications with NSF, they have asked that I be the point of contact with the NSF program managers concerning eligibility questions. It does not particularly do from reaching out to NSF program officers to talk about science, but when it gets to the point of talking about eligibility or asking for funding, we ask that you contact our office immediately so that we can reach out to NSF and have those discussions. And then any proposals to NSF EGS do require an additional internal review and approval by the NCAR director. Next slide, please. Okay, now I'm going to switch gears and talk about PI eligibility on NCAR proposals, particularly for postdocs. So I have posted the link to our PI eligibility guidelines so that you can review that. We do have a paragraph where we talk about eligibility for stock fellows. We have indicated in our guidelines and this guideline was developed in collaboration with UCAR, UCP and NCAR, so this was not developed just by our office. I think we are gonna look at reevaluating the guideline, but at the time being, this is how it stands. That typically a postdoc can only serve as PI if the sponsor announcement requires that, if the work is specific to the postdoc, or if the project will be finalized within the timeframe of the postdoc's current appointment. Also, if a postdoc wants to serve as PI on a proposal, a senior UCAR staff member must be designated as a co-PI. And again, postdocs should work with their supervisor and LCPO administrator and there is a form that they would complete in that form is on the link that I've posted there on the page. Next slide, please. Anybody who wants to serve as a PI on a proposal NCAR is required to take a proposal training and sign a salary access form. Postdocs may participate in proposals as co-PI, co-I, senior personnel, key personnel, or postdoc without any prior approval through our office. So again, those are discussions that would happen with your lab and supervisor, but if you're only serving as a co-PI or key personnel, et cetera, you do not need our office approval. And then as I had mentioned earlier, if there's any situations where you're being asked to participate as an unfunded collaborator on a proposal, please reach out to your LCPO administrator. Next slide, please. So there is a question, I think, the last time about what are the funding requirements for project scientists? And Christine is probably gonna talk about some of this as well. This is something that our office does not really engage in. Those hiring decisions to move a postdoc into a project scientist position are really made on a case-by-case basis with your supervisor and within each of the LCPOs. So please work with them on that particular topic. And I think there was a question on funding requirements. So, and that is gonna be different between each LCPO as well for project scientists. So some project scientists are required to find full funding from external resources while others may be able to have a portion of their salary covered from NSF-based funds. Each of our labs is set up differently in terms of their profile of base funding to external funding. And that's why it's on a case-by-case basis. And there may be questions that come up in the slide that we can address at that time. Okay, soft money pursuit strategies was another item I would ask to kind of talk about. So, even though there's a lot of guidelines that we have to follow within our cooperative repayment and with NSF, I will say that generally speaking, most sponsors will allow proposals from FFRDCs. We typically don't have any concerns submitting to NASA, NOAA, DOE, NSF is on a case-by-case basis. So, there are a lot of other opportunities out there. We do still ask that we review each of the announcements to confirm eligibility because there may be cases where NASA for example, has the NASA roses announcements and generally speaking, FFRDCs are always eligible under that announcement. But they also offer some programs outside of the roses program and in those cases, NCAR may not be eligible. We've also seen on NOAA and DOE that it's on a solicitation-by-solicitation basis. So, there's not just an overarching guideline that FFRDCs are eligible or not eligible. While our office does not facilitate finding funding opportunities for the staff here at NCAR, we do keep a website of all of the sponsor announcements that we've been asked to review and our eligibility determinations. And we keep that on our proposal website and I posted the link there. Again, I would highly recommend that you discuss funding strategies with your supervisor and LCPO and just a reminder that all of our soft funding should support our NCAR strategic priorities. Next slide, please. And then regarding internal deadlines, each LCPO is gonna have their own internal deadlines. So again, talk to your supervisor and administrator about that. The sooner you let everybody know, the better. We like it if you find a funding opportunity to let somebody know right away. Developing a proposal is a lengthy process and in case there's other internal reviews that need to be done, we wanna make sure we have sufficient lead time. So, what I did wanna mention is the NCAR criteria responses are due to the NCAR proposal office two weeks prior to the proposal submission. And then we ask for the final proposal three days prior to the sponsor deadline. This is typically for those cases when we're submitting through a sponsor system, our office goes through a very detailed review of your proposal to ensure that it meets all of the sponsor requirements and isn't gonna get thrown out and not go through the peer review process because you forgot a document or something like that. But we also do review all of the documents that go out to lead institutions where NCAR might be serving as a civil warden. And then in situations where universities are the lead, they may want our materials even further in advance from the sponsor deadline. So we have to keep that in into consideration. Next slide, I think that's the end of questions. All right, so you can reach out to me at any time. You can also send emails to our NCAR crop alias and that will go to myself, Melinda, Andrea, Steve, and Nathan. And most of us are working remotely, the majority of the time, so email is the best way to communicate with us. And again, that is a lot of rules, a lot of rules that don't necessarily apply to UCP. So I apologize if you have to sit and listen through that and it doesn't apply to you. And again, we're happy to help. Our goal is customer service. So we wanna work with you and help you in any way that we can. So thank you. Thank you, Valerie. This was really helpful and useful and we will be sharing this slides later on as well so people can refer to it. And we'll get back to you on questions after we hear from Anna about transferring grants and contracts. Thanks, Anna. I would like to echo what Valerie just said about we are here for customer service. And most of my team also works remotely. I literally have people from Florida to San Diego at this point. So email is definitely the best way to get ahold of us as well. So first and foremost, I wanted to kind of provide a disclaimer. Our post-award side of the house is also very rule-driven. And so UCAR contracts doesn't necessarily make these rules. We're merely here to kind of help you navigate the soup that is all of the different sponsor requirements and all of that kind of stuff. So please reach out to us if you have award-specific questions because if your question is just generalized and it's not specific to a sponsor, it may be a different answer. So just kind of keeping that in mind. I also purposely kept these slides dense so that you would have a reference material to go back and look at should this come up for you. Historically, UCAR hasn't had a lot of grants transferred out of UCAR and away to sponsors, but given the current climate in the United States, in the HR world, I recognize that it is probably going to happen at some point in time. Next slide, please. I have been doing research administration for about 17 years. I've done pre-award and post-award and contracts and grants and service agreements, clinical trials, engineering type contracts. I've done all of the things and so if you have questions about transferring awards, please reach out to me because I have at least probably got some sort of reference for you. So transferring awards is the shortest absolute way to explain it is we give our award away and end our award and then a new institution does all that they need to do to propose and get a new award that is really the old award, okay? So most of today is gonna focus on what we do here for the outgoing portion, which is that first bullet point because if you transfer somewhere else, they're going to have their own rules and their own regulations about what needs to happen at Proposal and how to get that awarded in their own system. And so I am going to try and focus on the first bullet point. All right, next, there we go. So an award transfer kind of basics and I had to shorten this to try and get it all on one slide. And so it's a very complicated process. I recognize ending an award and starting an award. How difficult could it be, right? It's really actually one of the most complicated things you could possibly do. So it occurs when a PI enters or leaves an entity and has an active award in their name that needs to come in or go out of the original funded entity. Because we have awards that also transfer in to UCAR as well. We actually have an entire new entity in UCP that we are working on transferring all of their previous awards into UCAR and that's Consortium for Ocean Leadership. And I'm working on those as we speak. So awards are made through UCAR. They are not made to API. They are made to UCAR, right? UCAR is the legal entity. They're not made to NCAR. They're not made to UCP. The awards that come in that need to be transferred, we really need to look at who is listed as the PI on that award. And since postdocs are not typically eligible PIs, they're not typically listed as the PI. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the postdoc isn't the one doing primarily all of the work. We have an award currently that has a different PI named that is transferring out to a different university. But the entire scope of work was for this one postdoc to do this one statement of work, right? It was all that one person. And it was not the named PI. And so that award, for example, is transferring out. So if you're not eligible as the PI, it's not really typically yours to take, right? So if that PI is staying here, the decision can be made to have either either you as the postdoc could be replaced by a different postdoc if somebody else could do the work internally. Or if you were going to transfer that award away, you're gonna need to get some approvals. So the requirements are different for every single sponsor out there. And this is where we come in to try and help you understand the different alphabet soup. Planning ahead is the most important process. If you give two weeks notice, know that this process takes anywhere from four to six and sometimes longer months, right? So we really need to start this process as soon as humanly possible if we're really going to be transferring awards out. And then you car must first relinquish the award prior to the new award being issued to your new institution. That's what it's called. So we would have to notify the sponsor that we're willing to relinquish or that we're wanting to do this. And so there's an entire process involved in that as well. All right. The part that takes the longest on these is the financial close out of awards and I'll get into that later because you have to wait for a month in to close and maybe months in to close. So again, the earlier the better as far as reaching out to our team is concerned. So the steps for transferring the award, first you're gonna need to get approval from your lab directors and possibly your entity director to take the award with you. We on our team are working on creating a written procedure that is very much more specific in this way because right now there's no guidance out there on the award transfer process and it's very dependent on what's going on. So we're working on it. So you're also gonna need to notify your LCPO administrator of your intent to transfer because there's a lot that they're going to need to do too. And then you also need a firm date identified for the transfer or end date at UCAR, right? Until you know when that end date is, we can't do anything. Final financial reports must be submitted and accepted by the sponsor as well as final technical reports must be approved and forwarded to our office as well prior to your leaving UCAR. And the reason for that is we're still on the hook for all of those reporting requirements that were in your award. Say you have a five year award in your name and we're in year two, we still have all of the requirements of that award specifically in a more truncated time period. And so we have a lot more work to do right now if you're transferring an award than you would otherwise. And so if the PI is just changing at UCAR, that's a much simpler process, but if you're really taking it with you, you really have to close it out financially and technically so that there's a true, this is the work that got done at UCAR so that it can move forward at the next place. Next slide, please. Financial closeout has to occur first at UCAR. And this is the singular thing that makes these things take as long as they do. So the first thing is expenditures, including all of your salary, all journal entries, payroll expense transfers, travel reimbursements, final invoices from subcontractors or sub-awardees, they all have to be fully posted to the award account key, okay? That doesn't normally happen until you leave, right? You still have salary that has to be charged somewhere. And so we also have payroll periods, for example, that cross over the end of a month. And so if it crosses over the end of your last month, then we have to wait till the next month closes, et cetera. So any subcontracts or sub-awards that you have will need to be terminated and will have to get their final costs as well. So C above, right? They're gonna have to do all of that stuff at their institution too. And then it has to be paid by us prior to us terminating the award, right? So if you have any subcontracts or sub-awards on any of your awards, that is normally at minimum one additional month in the process. And then once all of those costs are done hitting your account, then we are going to have to close the account, right? So the final invoice has to be submitted and marked final if it's to a sponsor that needs invoices. Some sponsors, federal prime sponsors need an SF425 or a final financial report submitted through their online systems. And so those have to be submitted and accepted before we can truly close it out as well. And then once they accept it, then they have normally 30 days to pay it. So as you're mentally thinking about this, that first bullet point is 30 days, the next bullet point could be 30 days, the invoice is another 30 days. And so the time that it takes to transfer awards is starting to add up, right? And that's just on our side of this transfer process. And so if UCART is the primal awardee, it normally goes a little bit faster than if we are a subcontractor, but there are some different steps that are a little bit different. And then the very last thing, which often people think is the very first thing, is we get a modification from the sponsor that is a de-obligation mod or a negative dollars, right? Mod relinquishing the award. And so it'll say your total has been reduced to this dollar amount and your period of performance has been changed to end on this specific day and all of your obligations have been met. And then we will sign and process that. Then it is up to the sponsor to then take action to get your new entity, your new award. So it's quite the financial process to terminate an award. And most of this has nothing to do with our office. We get involved at the very end and we facilitate this process, but this is really, really between your lab admins doing the hard work of making sure that finance gets those final financials all in order and it's not really on UCAR contracts. But the process is definitely something that we are involved in and the communication of where things are in this, we are definitely involved in. So next slide, please. So final technical reporting specific to transfers, right? So we talked about the financial part first because the financial part is the part that you wanna get started first because it takes so long. You may want to transfer and stop spending on awards before your end date to just try and get things moving, right? But your final technical reporting will also have to be done. And that's your final, your annual, your whatever reports that are required in your award terms and conditions. So before this first, before you submit the final report to your sponsor, you're gonna really want to reach out to your tech, your prime PI if you're a subcontractor or your program officer, program manager at your sponsor directly and give them a heads up, right? They may have guidance for you that is really, really important on how they want you to provide a final report from UCAR. Every sponsor is different. For example, NASA wants things one way, O and R wants it a different way, NOAA wants it a third way, et cetera. In SF, we need to submit it on Vaseline, actually, et cetera. So it's a more complicated process than you might think to actually submit that final report than it normally would. So I would definitely suggest that because it may save you time and effort before you really get going. But my second sub bullet point here is if a portion of the award is supposed to be staying at UCAR, we may want to transfer a piece of this award to you at your new institution as a faster way to get things going. Now, I am aware that that is much less, I don't know, prestigious for you to not be the PI or that federal award, et cetera. But if you say we're in your four of a five-year award and the majority of the work that has been done to date has been done by an entire team and you are but one person, then it may make sense for your piece to be a new subcontract to your new entity, in which case the only thing we're going to need to do is ask the sponsor for permission to subcontract. They're gonna know why because you reached out to your program manager already. And then we would just draft a sub award or a subcontract to your new institution for your portion of it and you would basically do whatever proposal is needed at your new institution for just your part. And so we can negotiate how much of that stays here that's left versus what piece you need to take with you to finish it up. So there's really kind of different strategies depending on how far into your award you really are, right? If you're just now starting your award and you've got two months worth of expenditures on it and now you want to transfer it, that's a totally different scenario to we have eight months left on this award. We've gotten all of the data, we're crunching the data, we've started drafting the manuscript. Like if you're in that piece of it and you just really need a little bit more salary support to get the thing done, then that's a different scenario, right? So that's why I say reach out to our team so that we can help walk you through what might be the fastest and most feasible way for you to get your award to your new institution. And then I would also say that please, please, please submit your final accepted technical report. I say accepted because I want your program officer to accept it first to our team on direct awards with your new forwarding email address. If there are loosens that need to be tied up, we are going to need to know how to contact you to keep the ball rolling. So it behooves you to provide us with that information. All right, let's see. Compliance, this is like a laundry list of all the things you've forgot about. And it's really just a way to get your brain thinking. So if you have equipment, which is generally speaking, items that are $5,000 or more, not just a $2,000 laptop, is it going, and was it purchased on your award? And if it was purchased on your award, is it staying here or is it going with you? How is it titled? Is it you car titled? Is it conditionally titled? Meaning we have to ask the sponsor if we can keep it or give it away. Or is it sponsor or government titled? And then does it have a tag? So we may need to reach out to Betsy and Property and have her do an assessment on your awards, that specific piece of equipment and what it is we might need to do with it so that you can take it with you. Most often people will want to take their laptop with them that was purchased on an award. And so that may be something that you also need to discuss with your lab or program before you reach out and talk to Betsy, et cetera. Because as of right now, any of the things that you are working on are either titled to you car or a sponsor or the federal government. And in which case they're not really yours to take, right? And so if they were purchased with you car dollars, we need to properly transfer those things as well. And then there are also the restricted research type compliant things that need to be considered as well. Have you received any export controlled items? Likely no, but I have to mention it. Or controlled unclassified information.  Are there FSMA requirements for the information that you are dealing with? Is there sponsored proprietary or joint IP that was created on your awards, right? All of these kinds of things that you can't just pick up and take somewhere without notifying them that you're going somewhere and you're taking it with you, right? So there may be additional steps and additional approvals that are needed prior to you just picking up and taking it with you. If you have access, for example, and have done trainings with NASA certain awards that we have under ACOM, I know about, I don't know about other labs and programs, but NASA, for example, if you're accessing certain data on some of their systems, they require you to take a specific training. That specific training is done through a portal. That specific portal is done by entity. And so you may have to retake that training and or have somebody on the backend pick it up and plop it over here, that kind of a thing, right? So there are weird things that can come up is my point about any of these compliance related things in your awards. And that's why it's specific to award and specific to sponsors. And there isn't a streamlined and this is the process because every sponsor really is different. We are putting together a document that will be helpful in this regard for Prime NSF, Prime NOAA and Prime NASA Awards because those are the ones that grant specifically, there's a specific process and they're each different based on sponsor. So those we can at least show you didactically what checkbox things need to be done. If there is an intellectual property that has been created during the project, either by you or someone at UCAR or by your sponsors jointly, we would need to also make sure that that is handled as well through our Office of General Counsel prior to you leaving. So, and a lot of times awards have requirements at the end of the award that requires us to at close out, tell the sponsor whether or not intellectual property was created. And so if that type of a report was required, even if the answer is no, we still need to know about it. So, next slide. Okay, so now what, right? So now we've done all the things in the arduous task of what needed to be submitted has been submitted to the federal sponsor and they're working their magic and what is it that you're gonna be required to do on the other end, right? So this is what would be required at your new employer, right? So now you can finalize your proposal process because you have a final dollar amount that won't change and that's the important part, right? Because they accepted the final financial report and they paid us our final dollar amount, right? So you now have a total dollar amount for your new proposal that can move forward. You also have, this is exactly what we did, completely finished and approved by the federal sponsor of the technical report. And so now from that point forward, you have what's remaining scope of work to write at your new institution. And then most federal sponsors will require you to submit a full new proposal. Sometimes they just want you to resubmit what was originally submitted with a revised budget, of course. Sometimes they want you to write from this point forward. It depends on the sponsor. And it will also depend on your new institution and what their policies and procedures are as far as submitting proposals through their proposal office, right? So I can only tell you what a couple of proposal offices in this country will require. And so I can't promise you that it won't be arduous on that side as well, right? And oftentimes this, once you get to that point, this will be months from now. And so do not expect no gap in funding if you're transferring awards. That's just not going to happen. As fast as it can possibly happen is probably with NSF and that process takes about two months if it's straightforward. And there are no subcontracts or subawards, I mean. So most other institutions will require PIs to take a basic PI training prior to the acceptance of awards in their name or the submission of proposals. UCAR doesn't require this, but most institutions will have some sort of required training for their PIs. So at least be prepared to quickly take this so that you can keep things moving on the other end, right? And then also be prepared to resubmit new conflict of interest disclosures at your new disclosures at your new institution. Those have a minimum annual requirement and or anytime something changes, it's up to you to provide any updates needed within 30 days. Oh, that's good, Valerie. And then, let's see. You'd also have to gather any proposals for your subawardees, right? So this is also a new subaward for them. Financially speaking, things to keep in mind when you are submitting a new proposal at your new institution, their fringe rate is going to be different than ours. Their indirect cost rate is going to be different than ours. They may not have fee, they may have fee. That your salary will very likely be different. Otherwise, why did you leave? There are other things that may shrink your budget, right? If you have subawards that need to be reissued at the new institution, they're going to take the indirect costs on that first $25,000. Again, on that subaward, let's see. So there are financial losses you will likely take when you transfer that remaining piece of the award. And so it may be a smaller award when it's all said and done as far as what direct costs you get to keep to do the proposal. So that is, I think, it. Next slide. So if you have any more questions, you can email me directly at the email above. And then the fastest response by anyone on direct awards is Fed Award and or submit a direct awards action request as well to get the process started. There's a lot of information we will need from you if you decide to leave and transfer multiple awards with you, for example. We need to know where you're going, answer all of those questions on the compliance slide. We need to know when your end date is and we need a plan on how all of those financial expenditures are gonna post. And so contact us early and often. I swear we're not scary. We just know your rules and regulations and that's what we do every day. And we recognize that all of you don't live in that world and you're doing the science and that's your expertise and this is our expertise. So please come to us. Thank you, Anna. This was really great. It's good to know that even though there's a lot of regulation, it is possible to transfer grants. And now we're gonna move to our third speaker, Christina Mikulski, who took the journey from being a postdoc to an NCAR project scientist herself and she's gonna share her experience with us today. I might need to reshare just to get her slides. If you give me a second. I think they're on there. They were? I saw them. Yeah, I may have just made my slides. Okay, while she's making that up, I think I'll just go ahead and start talking because I don't want us to have, I want us to make sure there's time for questions. But so my name is Christina Mikulski. I'm a CGD project scientist. I work on aerosol cloud interactions. I came from CSU. I graduated in 2017 and started as an ASP postdoc January, 2018. And then I transferred over to the project scientist role in January, 2020. So that's a little, so about two, so I did my full two years of the ASP postdoc transferred to the project scientist. So if you wanna go to the next slide. So I did write a proposal during my postdoc. I had a unique situation where I came from an observational background and I came as an ASP postdoc to bridge between observations and modeling, which included a lot of learning, we'll put it that way. And so I basically, I realized very quickly that I probably wasn't gonna have a very impressive paper necessarily come out of it. And instead I would use the science results as a seed for a proposal. And this was, I will say that I was lucky in a sense because I knew I wanted to stay in Colorado. I knew I wasn't gung-ho about a faculty position, especially not moving and stuff like this. I just was in a position where that made it really easy for me to focus in on the options that are local. And that's why project scientist was a very obvious direction for me. That is not the case for everybody. Some people have other goals in mind. And so I just wanted to kind of preface that with that's kind of, that's part of why I was able to say I wanna be a project scientist and I talked with my ASP host in regalment and was like, how do I make this happen? So that's a little bit of background there. So again, my science focus now on polar regions, but the proposal that I wrote was specifically over the Southern Ocean. And this was the project I came and worked on as ASP postdoc. The agency I targeted was Department of Energy Atmospheric System Research. The reason why I chose that agency was the timeline of that proposal solicitation and also the topic. I knew that DOE was interested in the topic that I was working with. I even knew the program manager. These are all things that made me decide to go towards that agency. And I wrote the proposal fully. Andrew basically provided a couple pieces of feedback and obviously Andrew was a big part of the science that went into it. But I took on the role as this proposal writer, yet I ended up putting Andrew Gettleman as the lead PI and he was willing to do that for me. A lot of that was motivated, there was two parts of this. One is that I've never been a PI before. And so instead of, and I've never written a proposal before I've never done any of this. And so it was actually really valuable to have somebody who was willing to take that risk of, okay, I'll be the PI. I'll be responsible for all the reports. I'll be responsible for budgeting. I'll be responsible for dealing with all the things you just heard about that are very complicated and can be overwhelming. He had the experience, he knew what to do. So that was part of it. Was that, okay, that makes it easier on me and more I can focus more on the science and less about these really complicated processes that we have to follow here at any institution that's this way, right? Not just NCAR. And the second reason why Andrew, I was happy that Andrew was able to be PI was that his expertise was giving the proposal that much more credit, right? So because I was still developing myself as a modeler, I didn't think that any reviewer would be able to look at that proposal and say, oh yeah, Christine is totally possible of doing this without any help from Andrew. So by him being the lead PI that I think was also strategic from that point of view of the scientific knowledge base would be there. And then we were able to put in the budget 70% of my funding, so 0.7 FTE. So that's a pretty good chunk of my funding. And that was needed in order for me to actually be able to support a project scientist position. It wasn't like I didn't wanna spend time writing a proposal that was gonna do 0.1 FTE. I wanted to go big. Next slide. Okay, so how do you get started on this? So for my experience as a postdoc and even now the biggest thing I tell people is talk to people. Learn about, especially for in-car specific, learn about the project scientist position. If you're an institution, learn about the research scientist position, learn what is a typical proposal requirement and funding requirements. Some labs, they have base funding, other labs, they do not. In my particular, and in some labs you have a mix. So in my particular case, I'm 100% soft funding. So going into this process, I was like, okay, I have to be prepared to write several proposals a year. And so that, and that was something I was happy to do. And then the other thing as you talk to people is learn what agencies fund your research topics. Learn what Roses call is most common to support MJO. I don't know, whatever research it is that you're doing. And the way you can find that out is by not just talking to your host but talk to your previous PIs. Look at papers, see what paper, like what funding agencies are acknowledged in papers. All these things help provide clues as to what funding agencies are appropriate to fund the research that you're working on. So that's, I think, a really big thing to kind of be proactive in getting started. And then another thing to think about is looking at other proposals. So ask for example, the person who's been the PI of the work that you are funded on, ask to see that proposal so that you can see this is the proposal that ended up funding my PhD or my postdoc or whatever it is.  And it's actually not that scary, right? And in fact, I think it's more fun because you get to be creative. You do a really deep dive on the literature and hear about all these other cool things that are going on. And it's not a peer reviewed process, right? You get to kind of be as bold as you want or not as bold as you want. And there's kind of this art creative aspect of creating a science proposal that you may find that is not actually so scary. And then as we've seen, the NCAR admin teams, they are amazing. It really is a great thing to be able to be here and not worry about figuring out, navigating the complicated process. And there are like hurdles. It takes a long time and all this stuff because it is complicated, but that's just part of the process that's not just NCAR, it's everywhere. And so just keep that in mind that you can really focus on the science and then really lean on your admin teams and your PI host supervisor for helping you navigate through the logistics and the budget type questions. Next slide. And then there's been a talk about PI and transferring grants, all these things. I sort of already went into kind of my two cents on the PI role for my particular case. And I do really recommend that that PI role is a little scary to just step right into. And being a COI, I think is really, is still very valuable and that looks great on a CV. And you can write, I have on my CV that I'm a COI but I led all the writing of this proposal. Like I clarified that in the CV. So if you're worried about that, there are ways around it. So I think it lowers your personal risk by not stepping into this really high level of responsibility right away. But yet you can still have control of the science. And I think that takes just a very honest conversation with whoever your host or advisor is or whoever you end up working on with the grants. And just don't be shy. There is a lot of really bad proposals out there and there are a lot of really bad proposals that get funded and there are a lot of really amazing proposals that don't get funded. There's no logic to it. Just do something, try it. Worst case scenario is your proposal gets rejected but that's actually not that bad because you still have now a 15 page document of a really well-developed idea and you have reviewer comments. So you can incorporate those in and there's nothing wrong with resubmitting it. So just remember that that risk there isn't as big as it may seem. Next slide. And then what else can you do? I have to do, I have to mention the role of these panel reviews. So as a scientist, when you hear a proposal getting funded and you're like, how did that happen? And this all happens in these small rooms of these panel reviews and they are intense. You spend weeks writing a 15 page proposal and your reviewers will spend maybe, maybe if you're lucky an hour reading it. And then in the room, they spend 15 to 20 minutes discussing it. So it really has to be easy to condense and also convince somebody right away that your ideas are strong and exciting and will contribute to whatever that agency is prioritizing. So you can ask to join agency panel reviews, especially as a postdoc, they love this because it's a way for them to engage their early career scientists. So ask around to your network and you can even email program managers. And so that's something that I really highly recommend. And then in addition to that, I hear that there's a mock panel review being organized, which is really exciting. This is a way to basically bring a panel review to NCAR and then making it this peer review with your other postdocs. This is a picture from our peer review in 2018. Amanda Adams, who is a NSF program manager actually was willing to sit in the room with us. And I hear that, I think I saw Eric Dweevers on the call too. These are incredible opportunities to hear about how decisions are made in this very important step in the proposal selection process. So take advantage of that. And even as a just a participant, if you aren't actually submitting a proposal, even just sitting in that room is just, it really provides a lot of information and context on how this proposal process works. And I will say that, as a PhD, no matter what track you go on, assuming you stay in academia, which I know is not always the case these days, but even in the private industry, this idea of proposal writing is just, it will be a skill set you'll take forever. So just keep that in mind. And then I think that might be everything I have. And I will just mention that adding car, like as a project scientist, I'm very happy. And I really highly recommend this role. If anybody ever wants to talk about it, I know that every situation is different. And so you have to remember that. My end is one today. So talk to people and find out more information, okay? And then hopefully that was really fast. We have time for questions. Yeah, that was great, Christina. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. And now I'm gonna hand it over to Mariana, who's gonna be moderating the Q&A. Yeah. And join us on Slido. Great. So just a reminder, if you have questions to put them in to Slido, and Hugh will pop the link in there if you need to find it somewhere. But so our first question, so we're doing this based off of the number of uploads. So the first question, this is more directed towards Valerie. It says, it seems applying for grants, MSF, or other government agencies is rather restrictive. How do project scientists get their funding at NCAR? Yeah, great question. So it can be somewhat restrictive, but I don't wanna say it's impossible. We submit 400 to 500 proposals a year. So obviously there are plenty of opportunities out there. It's just maybe going through those processes to find the right opportunity that we can respond to. A lot of ways that people navigate some of the FFRDC restrictions is that they have a university leave the proposal. Like situations with NOAA and DOE, a lot of times they're open to the idea of NCAR participating as a sub-awardee. Similarly with NSF. So I don't have a number in front of me, but a bulk of our proposals are led by the university community and NCAR participates as either a sub-awardee or as a joint proposer. Great. Hopefully that answered some of the questions, but if you guys have more follow-up questions, I definitely suggest reaching out to Valerie. She is very helpful and she replies to emails, which can be a challenge when you get so many swamps. So we're really thankful for that. So the second one we have here for Christina, what is the lead time that you work on for submitting slash securing a proposal to make sure there's no gap in the funding for your salary? Yeah, this is a great question. I think this is something that you should be checking in with your supervisor on kind of a quarterly to six month basis. It's pretty complicated projecting things out. A lot of times projects will pop up and need to be spent out or these, there's a lot of kind of stuff that you can't really anticipate. And that's where again, you have to lean on the amazing resources we have in our admin team and then navigating those things. So it's just what I tended to do is I tended to just ask on like a quarterly basis like how are things looking? How is this project getting spent out? How is, what's the projected funding looking like? And then the other thing I will say is that it's good to just kind of, I have a document that's just like proposal ideas where it's like nothing super developed but just like a spark of an idea of this is something I think could be interesting so that if a call comes out and I have the energy and the motivation to do it, then I can pursue that. And so if you have these ideas, write them down because it makes it that much easier. So the proposal I actually submitted, I had been thinking about that idea for a long time. And so when I actually went to go write that proposal, it was pretty quick. So anyways, that's kind of related to this timeline idea of keep these ideas handy so that if in one of your quarterly asks, it turns out that, oh, budgets tight, let's figure out what's gonna happen kind of thing. Yeah, hopefully that helps. But this is something I would say that across the organization, it's different depending on what lab you're in. And cause I know Rao has like a pretty good system of doing these like projections of funding and stuff but that's not necessarily the case everywhere. All right. So the next question is for you again, Christina. Is writing a proposal an important prerequisite for becoming a project scientist at NCAR, what are the other avenues, I'm assuming other avenues for becoming a project scientist? Yeah, this is also a good question. It's not a prerequisite. There's a lot of people, I think on this call who were able to, there were project scientists openings based on other proposals that had been funded and they were able to apply for that position more or less and be accepted into that role. So I don't, it's not a prerequisite. I liked it because it made it, I liked going that way because I work on the only science I've built. But oftentimes you can find projects that align really well with your research interests in which case, congratulations, you're very lucky. So I think that it's totally possible to do this without writing your proposal. Yeah. Great. So we have a question for Valerie. What are some guidelines for what makes a proposal really competitive versus what makes it for an unfair advantage? Yeah, so I just pulled up our guidelines. I'll, let me post the link so anybody can go into our webpage and look at this information that kind of talks about the proposal review panel that we have and what they're looking at in terms of unfair competition. So we typically say that unfair advantage is use of our models, data, observational facilities, et cetera, high performance computing over and above what a typical university researcher has access to. Now the majority of our models are available to the community. So a lot of the things that we are doing and proposing for, we're not necessarily computing unfairly. We're looking for more situations where maybe a PI has developed their own model and they're using that model to get additional grant funding and the community does not have access to that model. That may be considered an unfair advantage. A lot of times though, that our scientists will make that model available through collaborative efforts. So then that kind of sets aside where it's not really unfair competition. So it's kind of a tricky process to navigate. It's hard to define it. So review the criteria and then let me know if you have any more questions on that one. Thank you. So we have another one for Christina. How many projects are you currently working on? Solely the grant that you secured and then where does the funding for the last 0.3 full-time employee come from? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's really hard to get something that has your full FTE. And so you're almost always gonna be working on at least two projects. I work on two right now. Soon after that proposal got funded, well, so the way it worked out is I submitted that proposal. I think it was in March or April. I found out about it June, actually on my birthday. It's very cool. I found out about it in June and the funding arrived in like October or so for like that to be the start date, but we didn't actually start spending on the project until the following January because I finished out my ASP fellowship. And so then, so that's one thing is this delayed start. You know, there are some flexibilities around that, not too much, but like, you know, you need to be reasonable, but there are some options there. And then during that time, I started writing another proposal that actually was to NSF Office of Polar Programs with a university lead PI. And I had two months there. And so when you have these like small FTE grant gaps, it's a little bit easier to fill. If you're trying to fill, you know, a half FTE, that's a lot harder, but especially with Andrew Gudman working on very similar research, I was able to like charge to a couple of grants that he's already had funded to kind of fill in around whatever gaps there were. And so this is again, where I think having a really good conversation with whoever's gonna be your supervisor of how they tend to address those types of gaps, how do they avoid those gaps? And then like what the conversation is around being able to go on to other projects and stuff like that.  But right now I'm working on two projects. So. Okay, thank you. So I certainly have a question for Anna, so I wanna grab that one. So Anna, you mentioned a variety of alternatives to doing a full transfer of a proposal. Would one of those alternatives be preferred or is it primarily case dependent? I would say it's really case dependent. UCART doesn't want to give awards away, right? So, I mean, think about it from a business perspective and not from the seat you're sitting in. So if there's any way to keep the award here as it was awarded and then issue a subcontract to your new institution, or really think about whether or not you can finish that award prior to leaving, right? If there is six months or less remaining on your award, there is no benefit in trying to go through this entire huge process to get it transferred because it's gonna be over by the time you get it transferred. So there's a real risk benefit assessment that needs to be done, not just from your perspective of I need my FTE covered because I understand that that's, you know, that's the root of all of this, right? But at the same time, there's like a reasonableness factor. Like certain sponsors are gonna take a long time. We've been working on transferring the Consortium for Ocean Leadership Awards that are primarily prime federal grants, okay? Most of those awards are still not here and we started this process in July and we have had a team of very informed people working on that from the beginning, right? They ended their business on 9.30 and so that is the last day they had expenditures or could have expenditures, right? But we did all of these other things all the way up until that point, right? All the proposals were written, all of the proposals were officially ready to be submitted, all of those kind of things were occurring long before 9.30, right? So I would just suggest that you think about how the work can be finished in the way that makes the most sense and talk to your supervisor about that, right? Are you the only person who could work on this or could it be reassigned to somebody else? It may be easier. The other thing is if you're going to a for-profit entity, they may not be able to accept your awards and that's a real consideration, right? So if you have decided you want to move out of academia, great, but your award can't necessarily go with you. And so there are restrictions on for-profit entities receiving certain types of awards. They may not be able to receive a grant, it may need to be a contract and then there's so many if-then-wins on the post-award side that it really does depend, but there really needs to be an assessment made about how much time is remaining is probably the first question that you should ask yourself before you leave and when you're thinking about leaving, right? You know, when you're starting to apply for jobs. So can you finish that project cleanly and whatever the deliverables are before you take off or right around that time? We have awards that we're not terminating or transferring that are ending this month, yet the PI left a couple of months ago. I wanna say late August was when that PI left. And so when that PI slash postdoc left, he made sure that the majority of the work was accomplished on this award and we're not transferring it. And so because it wouldn't have been funded at his new institution within the amount of time that was left anyways, right? So you may have to ramp up work instead of pausing it and restarting it. So it just depends on the awards and the situations. But the federal agencies are not fast and if you decide to go at the end of the federal fiscal year, 930 or something along that line, know that their system is gonna be shut down for the next two months and nothing's going to happen, right? So there are also system restrictions within the federal government. If we're on a continuing resolution, they may not be able to award that until the CR has ended. There's all sorts of political things that happen at the federal agencies that can affect whether or not things can move forward. Great, thank you. So the takeaway is it is project dependent and timeline dependent. So make sure that you give yourself enough time that if you need to transfer it, you're contacting the appropriate people. So work backwards from the deadline rather than up to the deadline. So we're gonna take one more question and then we'll be wrapping up the session. So the last question is for Christina and it is considering the additional projects that you're working on writing papers and developing or submitting proposals or three proposals in a year. Could you please tell us about your time management and how you make this all possible? I don't know. I don't know if we have time for this question. Well, to the best of your ability, again, knowing that and one. Okay, again, N equals one. I think this is such an important thing to ask people, especially in the projects are really in any of the roles that we have here at NCARC. For me personally, I really enjoy proposal writing. So it's not too hard for me to prioritize it. And the other thing that helps a ton is that NCAR has a proposal writing project code. And so it does help augment the amount of time it does take to write your proposal. That's meant to be used for when you're doing the actual writing of that proposal. So that helps with some of the time management. But I would argue that most people are never really in true balance of all these things. And it's just, I think of it as the seasons of like weeks where I'm in a season of I know all I'm doing is research and analysis. And then I have a few days where all I'm doing is proposal related things. And it just kind of is always out of balance. I will be totally honest with you. But I think it is very possible to do this while keeping a reasonable schedule and those sorts of things. But I think everyone is different.  You know, like this is a not, this isn't good advice. Like, so I think everyone kind of finds what works for them in their schedule. And I've got kind of a different personal life schedule. So I don't know, I feel like this question is just very, again, just depends on your person and who you are and what your life looks like. So I don't know, I don't really wanna make it seem like I have everything under control because that's not really the case. But I've also, it's working. So anyway, that's I guess my very bad answer to that. But honest answer. You need an honest, so thank you. So in being cognizant of the time, I just wanted to address that one, if you look in the chat, Anna has answered the question about where can you find maybe funded or unfunded proposals to look at. But right now I would like to give all of the panelists 60 seconds to give their final thoughts of wrapping up of what they would like their main takeaways of the session to be. So what do you want as postdocs in early career to walk away from with advice for moving forward? So I will first pass the mic to Valerie. Thank you. Thank you again for inviting me. Again, I know there appears to be a lot of rules. There's a lot of rules everywhere you go. So in car may be a tad more challenging, but we're here to help. And like I mentioned, people are very successful with submitting proposals and getting an award funding. So even though there's challenges, there's a lot of successes, so keep that in mind. And now the mic to Anna. Yeah, I would definitely second that. I think that you have gotten your PhD and are doing the type of science that you are becoming an expert in. Definitely defer and let us be the expert in all of the other award terms and conditions. And if you have questions about your awards before you get to the point where you decide you transfer because normally some switch has flipped in you to get to that point, reach out to us. And there are tons of things out there in the universe that we could share with you that might help you to understand things better. Historically, our team's website has not been that great. And so this year my goal and the goals of many of my, on my team are to kind of build up that website so that there are more guidance options out there for PIs, postdocs and anybody within UCAR. I don't want us to be us versus them. And I don't want it to be a stigma that, oh, I don't wanna have to reach out to contracts. Ask the questions and I promise we will respond to you. So, whether it's a transfer or what are the actual requirements for me under this award? I am happy to pull apart all of those pieces of the dogma that is reading federal contracts and guidelines and all of that kind of stuff. So it's taken me a long time to learn this stuff and I learned things new every single day. And so there's no way that I would expect you guys to, as postdocs, just know all of this stuff. Cause I understand very well that it's not something that throughout your training up to this point, you haven't had a research administration class necessarily. And so let us help you, that's what I would say. Great, thank you. And now Christina. Yeah, I guess I would like to just put it out there that I would argue that academia fails to provide skill set building for navigating proposal writing both scientifically and all of the details that we talked about here today. So if you are feeling very overwhelmed by all these details, know that you are not alone. I was taking notes cause I was learning things and just know that that is a skill set that it is important to nurture and just acknowledge that this is something that is really required for people who want to lead science. And so you have to nurture the skill set. And so it's really beneficial to do things like read example proposals, go and find out what funding agencies support your work, write a proposal, give it a try. All these things can be really scary, but if you lean on the teams that we've heard about today and also find a good mentor, supervisor, whatever that person is, really lean on that too. Because again, this is not something that academia prepares us for very well, which is why I wrote that mock panel review thing with Sally because there's such a lack of resources for this insanely critical aspect of us having a job. So let's, I just wanted to put that out there. And your point is well-equipped with like, that's why this grant. Right, and thank you. Yes, thank you to the organizers for doing this because this is great. So yeah. So thank you, thank you everyone. And just as a reminder, we are on session number four, November 3rd, and that will be Project Logistics. And we're going to be covering how do you build a project budget? We're gonna have a template from Scott Landl that we're very excited to see. We'll also be hearing from James Doon about how do you put your best foot forward with qualification writing? And then we'll also be hearing from Christine Shields about time management, project management. How do you put that into your grant such that it is a not just great grant, but it's actually a feasible grant to be done. So with that, we will see everyone at Research Reviews next Thursday and then the Thursday after that, November 3rd, will be Project Logistics. So thank you everyone. I have a really weird request for the,


Hello, everyone. My name is Brolly Newman. I'm an Alabama 4-H State Ambassador from Pickens County, Alabama for the 2020-2021 school year. So I'm here today with Ms. Alicia Minghi, a social worker from Pickens County. And I'm going to be asking her some questions about her job. So Ms. Alisa, if you would please tell us a little bit about yourself. I am a licensed independent clinical social worker. I work for the Pickens County schools and provide therapy for the students at the schools in our county.  When I changed my major quite a few times, at first I was in fashion merchandising, then I moved to education. And when I was doing my practical in education, I was in a classroom. I was at an elementary school. And I kept noticing why the children were coming to school hungry, were coming to school dirty without a coat or needed supplies. And so I talked to my mom about it. And she said I needed to look into social work because she felt like I was more concerned about their emotional and physical well-being. And I did. And I guess mom's no best because I've been doing it every since. Yes ma'am. So what was your exact major in college? I did social work. I have a bachelor's and a master's in social work. Yes ma'am. What are some of the places in which you've worked? I have worked for a children's home. I've worked for Alabama Medicaid. Let's see, I've worked for an adoption agency. I've also done some private practice. Yes ma'am. What is a day like as a social worker for you? The days are kind of unpredictable. We never quite know what is going to come our way each day. Being in the clinics, I'm usually sure that I'm going to work with some students coming in and out. I have schedule appointments. We also do risk assessments on all of the students. So I schedule those too. And then of course we have those crisis that may come in and need immediate attention. Yes ma'am. What is the best thing about your job? I think the best thing is just being able to meet kids, adults, and just being able to watch them grow as I'm working with them and getting to know them. What's the worst? The worst probably is some of the, I've heard some really sad stories. I've interviewed, I've worked for DHR previously and I've interviewed children who've been physically abused, sexually abused. And having to hear those stories has been hard I think over the years. What is your take on how the pandemic is affecting not only adult mental health, but children as well? I think the pandemic is affecting adults and children because we have lost our normalcy. Our routines have changed. All of this is scary. And I think we're more, we're probably in less social situations. It probably has heightened anxiety for most of us and even complete to depression. Do you have any advice for teens and adults throughout Alabama who might be struggling with their mental health? I think probably, excuse me, I think that I would say don't be afraid to reach out for help. The first step is maybe letting an entrusted friend or adult know that you're struggling and just being able to talk to someone and allow yourself to get the help that you may need. How do you help widen the stigma on therapy and mental health awareness as a whole? I think that we all need to understand that if we were sick with say diabetes, we would see a doctor and we would take medication. Our mental health is the same. Sometimes we need to take medicine for emotional needs as well as talk to a therapist. It just helps us all around just as being physically fit. We also need to be emotionally fit. So in 4-H, we have a saying to make the best better. What is a way that you would make the best better in your job? I think by being there for whoever needs me. I think by showing care and compassion and empathy and also just encouraging anyone that I come in contact with. What advice would you give to youth who might possibly want to pursue your career in the future? I would definitely say go for it. I think the world could use more care, more compassion and definitely those who are willing to make a change for the better. Yes ma'am thank you so much for being with us today and for letting us sit down and taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with us and share some of the things about social work that not many people know. Well thank you. I enjoyed it and thanks for asking me to do this. You are so welcome.


Don't mess up the beauty of progress by comparing yourself to others. It's just not worth it. You are not better or worse than anyone else. You are on your own unique journey. And that's what we call life. Embrace it.


I can change this. So the next talk is asymptotically quasi-optimal cryptography, and Leo de Castro will give the talk. Thanks. These are the other slides, this one. Which slides did you want? The AQS slides, I downloaded them here. Great. Thanks. All right. Hi. So this talk is on asymptotically quasi-optimal cryptography. This is joint work with wonderful co-authors, Karmit, Ubal, Benod, and Muthu. So in this talk, we're going to introduce the notion of asymptotically quasi-optimal cryptography. And we're going to give new techniques to construct a QO crypto. And in particular, we're going to be focusing on semi-honest two-party computation. And also, we're going to briefly talk about constructions for malicious verifier zero knowledge and how to build that from sender rate one AQO batch OLE. So this talk is motivated by this fundamental question of what is the overhead of cryptography? So if we consider a cryptographic problem of size n, such as securely sending a message of length n over a public channel or performing batch OT or batch OLE of length n or proving the satisfiability of a linear size circuit with n inputs in zero knowledge, all of these can be insecurely solved with order and communication and computation. So what about the secure solution with security parameter lambda? Well, the most natural solutions usually have a multiplicative overhead. So you have something like order n times poly lambda, where you need to do roughly poly lambda work for each instance of your problem. The work of Isha'i, Kushi Levets, Ostrowski, and Hai showed an amortized overhead where you have some polynomial in lambda. And once your problem size becomes big enough, the overhead of the cryptography is just amortized over all the extra problem instances. But the problem is that this polynomial is unspecified. So it could be quite large. And it could be quite a while before your amortized efficiency really kicks in. So you could hope for the best possible overhead, which, in most cases, is just n plus lambda. You can sometimes do better in communication, but in general, n plus lambda is the best that you can hope for. So the problem is that asymptotic optimality is actually quite hard to achieve. We don't even have heuristic constructions for public key in encryption. So we're going to settle for asymptotic quasioptimal overhead, which is O tilde of n plus lambda. So we're going to allow for polylog factors. But this is going to get us within polylog factors of the best possible solution. So this is our stated goal, solve size n cryptographic problems with O tilde n plus lambda complexity. So what was known before this work? Some crypto problems did have AQO solutions, lots of solutions for secret key in encryption. Basically any secure PRF is going to give you a good secret key in encryption solution. For AQO public key in encryption, ring learning with errors is the main assumption that we have. This is going to be the main assumption that the rest of the talk is going to be focused on. If all you care about is AQO communication, elliptic curves will give you this, but because of the differentiation, you're not going to be able to get AQO computation. Similarly with the string OT, elliptic curves and ring learning with errors are the main assumptions. And additively homomorphic in encryption, you can also get from ring learning with errors. This is not for the function private version of this primitive. We're going to be talking about function privacy later. So in our work, we construct lots of AQO primitives, but the focus of this talk will be batch OLE. And all of our constructions are going to be relying on ring learning with errors. So let's jump into some brief background. What is batch OLE? It's a two-party protocol between a sender Alice and a receiver Bob. Alice has two vectors A and B. Bob has a vector X. At the end of the protocol, Alice gets nothing. And Bob gets the result A times X plus B, where all the arithmetic operations are component-wise. This is a fundamental building block of arithmetic NPC. And there are lots of special cases of this protocol that are very well studied. There's OLE, which is just where everything is a scalar. There's vector OLE, where A, B, and the output are all vectors, but Bob's input X is just a scalar. And then you can view this as an arithmetic analog of OT. You can get back to OT by just setting your plain text modulus equal to 2. Just very brief background on ring learning with errors. We have our polynomial ring, which is mod of a degree n polynomial. So our polynomials will have degree n minus 1. So they'll be represented by vectors of length n. And the ring LWE assumption states that these two distributions on the left and right here are not distinguishable. So in particular, this second polynomial in the output on the left is very close to a linear function in A. But the end on the right is just uniformly random. Very briefly, what we're going to define additively homomorphic in encryption, all of the AHE schemes that we'll be looking at today will be single instruction multiple data. So all the cybertexts are going to encrypt vectors of elements, and all the arithmetic operations will be component-wise. So like SIMD encrypted addition will take two encrypted vectors, A and B, and output on encryption of the component-wise sum of A and B. Same thing with plaintext addition. It's just that the upper end B is in the clear. And similarly for plaintext multiplication, it's just component-wise multiplication between A and B. So how do we get AHE from ring learning with errors? Most of you have probably seen this. But if not, the second polynomial has the structure diagrammed here, where it has this mask A times S that's taken away during decryption. And what's left is this polynomial here that has this large gap in the middle. The message bits are pushed to the top by the scaling factor delta. The error bits live in the bottom, and there's this big space in the middle to allow the error to grow. So when you have a cybertext, it looks like this ciphertext addition becomes very easy. You take the two ciphertexts, and you just add them component-wise. Plaintext addition in the same way, really. Plaintext multiplication is a simple operation, but maybe less simple in its implications. So again, we're just going to do the natural thing of just multiplying through the plaintext M prime by our ciphertext. So this gives us an encryption of M times M prime. But the problem now is that we have this error term that depends on M prime. And so if you were to give the ciphertext back to someone who knew the original error term, you're going to leak M prime to that party. And so this is a problem if you care about function privacy. And if you want to achieve function privacy, you have to hide this noise term in some way. The classic way of doing this, believe it or say it's all the way back to Gentry's original paper, is noise flooding, which is really just adding a noise term that's lambda bits larger than the error term you're trying to hide. So this works well, but it requires lambda extra bits of space in that gap between the message and the error. And so this is going to be a problem if we try to construct AQO batch OLE just from this straightforward AHE scheme. So let's take a look at this protocol. So Bob is going to encrypt his input X and Alice is then going to take her input and evaluate the plaintext ciphertext multiplication and plaintext ciphertext addition on Bob's ciphertext. This is going to generate an encryption of the OLE result. And then Alice is going to flood the ciphertext with noise. And so what Bob gets back is going to look like this. So the message bits in the top will have the OLE result. And in the bottom is going to need to be enough space for Alice's flooding noise. And so the original error term had roughly the log P bits from the multiplication. And then you need another lambda bits on top of that for the flooding noise. So this gives you a multiplicative N times lambda overheads. This is not AQO. So we need to fix this problem if we want to use this approach for an AQO OLE. So let's try to fix this. Let's try to ease the amount of noise that we're adding in this scheme. So let's go through this toy example that will illustrate this idea that we call gentle noise flooding. So let's start with some number E that we're going to try to hide. We just know that E is in some range, say zero to 10. And then we're going to have a noise term between zero and 20. That's just going to be one extra bit of E. It's not going to be lambda bits more than E. It's just going to be one more bit than E. And our noisy output is going to be just E plus eta. And so the challenge is going to be can you actually guess E given T? So sometimes this is going to be easy. When T is zero, there's only one set of E and eta that will be able to give this T output. And so, okay, this is not great. But if T is 10, then you have something a little bit more interesting. You have a value of eta for every possible value of E. And so you could argue that E is hidden. And you can actually formalize this by saying if T is in this middle range of possible values, then E is actually perfectly hidden.  So this is good. It means that we're hiding something. So let's look at what happens if Alice just uses a gentle flooding term as opposed to a regular flooding noise term in this AHE protocol. So Bob does the same thing. He encrypts his input X. Alice does the same thing to generate the encryption of the OLE output. But now instead of adding a flooding term, she adds just a gentle flooding term. And so what Bob gets back is a ciphertext that needs a lot less space between the message and the error because the noise term that Alice adds is a lot smaller. This is smaller both concretely and asymptotically. And the only downside is that now some of Alice's A input is actually leaked. So we need one extra idea to fix this. And the final idea here really is to use an OLE extractor, which is this really cool protocol that takes leaky OLEs for some bound on the leakage and turns them into truly random OLEs. We instantiate this extractor using the work of block, Gupta, Maji, and Nguyen with read Solomon codes to maintain our quasi-linear computation, which we need for a QO. And then once you have random OLEs, this is basically good enough for any OLE application. You can turn them into arbitrary OLEs. You can use them in other protocols. This is, we're gonna say that we're done once we have random OLEs. Okay, so what's our full a QO batch OLE protocol? We start with the folklore OLE protocol from additive homomorphic encryption. We use a random A, B, and X and we replace the flooding term with a gentle flooding term. So this will allow us to add only like log in, roughly log in extra bits of noise per term. And this will give us a bound on the number of leaked coordinates, call it L. And L is gonna be order lambda. So we only have order lambda coordinates leaked with very high probability. And then we can take this leakage bound L and what do I do? We can take this leakage bound L and plug it into the OLE extractor to get our random OLEs out. The nice thing about this protocol is that it's very concretely efficient. It's actually competitive with other state-of-the-art batch OLE protocols. And this was very surprising because semi-honest batch OLE has been optimized like crazy. And so to just kind of start with this very nice theoretical question and to end up with a concretely efficient protocol is a very motivating result. It suggests that this AQO problem can be this bridge from theory to concrete efficiency. Okay, but I said at the beginning, we're gonna talk about maliciously secure two-party computation in this AQO protocol, even though it's fast is only semi-honest. And in fact, if Bob is malicious, there's a pretty simple attack. If Bob sends a malformed ciphertext then Alice's full input could still be leaked. So if we want a maliciously secure batch OLE protocol, we're gonna need to do something else. So it didn't render right. The next bit of the talk is going to focus on this malicious receiver batch OLE protocol. I'm going to talk briefly about the malicious receiver batch OT protocol that we can build from the batch OLE protocol. And then I'll talk very briefly about the AQO zero knowledge from the batch OT and for the two-party secure computation I'll refer you to the paper. Okay, so as we said, there's an attack where if Bob sends a malformed ciphertext, Alice's input can be totally leaked. So if we want to defend against a malicious Bob, we need to say that for any ciphertext that Bob sends, at least some of Alice's input is going to be hidden. So there's lots of prior works on protocols like this. They're usually called statistically sender private OT or OLE, but for the reasons that we talked about at the beginning, none of these are AQO. So we want to think about how much information does the resulting ciphertext leak about Alice's input? And the simple upper bound here is just the number of extra bits that Alice sends beyond the output. So Alice has some output that she's trying to communicate to Bob, this is M. And then there's just going to be extra bits in the ciphertext. And we're just going to call all of these extra bits, say in the worst case, they're going to all leak information about Alice's input. And so we're just going to bound the leakage on Alice's input by the number of extra bits in the ciphertext. So the goal here then is to get less bits of leakage than are in Alice's input. And if we have this, then we can say, okay, at least some of Alice's input must be hidden. So the plaintext modulus log P could only be slightly smaller than the ciphertext modulus log Q. If we had a ciphertext modulus that was only a little bit bigger, then this would suffice. And the problem is that naively we need log Q to be greater than log P for correctness because we need space for the error to grow for the OLE multiplication. But there's a standard trick to fix this. It's called modulus reduction.  And then when you're finished all of the computations, you just reduce the modulus down and you end up with this much smaller modulus that is smaller than twice the plaintext modulus. So this is fine, but the second challenge now is that our ciphertext actually has two polynomials. So even though we have a small ciphertext modulus, the fact that we have two ciphertext polynomials means that Alice's input could be totally leaked in the second polynomial. Remember Alice has two polynomials as her input A and B. Really, if the A input is leaked, then so is everything else. So really we want to prevent Alice's A input from leaking and it could be that all of Alice's input leaks in the second ciphertext polynomial. So we naively need two log Q bits for this ciphertext, but we can actually get a better rate on this ciphertext by reusing this first term, K, K time. So instead of just encrypting one polynomial M, we're going to encrypt K polynomials and just reuse the same first ciphertext polynomial in the rest of these in encryption. So now our rate is K times log P, which is our message over K plus one times log Q, which is the number of polynomials. So the question is now, how do we actually get this ciphertext as a result? And the answer is to use a vector of secret keys and to write the message as a matrix with the message is just on the diagonal. The ciphertext is going to look like a matrix of polynomials that is K by K for the mask of the message, and then there's gonna be one extra column for the first polynomials. And then this whole thing is going to get masked by error. And so you might say, wait, this doesn't look a QO anymore, but actually it will be because K is gonna only be polylog lambda. So at the end though, if we have the sender input also be K polynomials, then we can get this ciphertext as the result just by multiplying this matrix by Alice's vector of polynomials as her input. And so this is good. So now we have our output ciphertext that's very high rate. And the point is that the number of extra bits in this output ciphertext is less than Alice's input. And as we said, K is gonna be polylog in N and lambda. So everything is still a QO. And this is an AQO batch OLE protocol with security against a malicious Bob. Okay, so then just very briefly, the way that we get batch OT from batch OLE is we start with N OLEs over some prime P and then we factor this composite that's slightly larger than P and then we reduce over this composite. And this gives us tau OLEs mod each prime and then we convert each OLE to an OT using the standard reduction. I believe I'm out of time. Yeah, yeah, so I'll leave it there. Thank you. Questions? You kind of use the two components ciphertext then you kind of do this trick with the fixed A and then many, many, many to get the six. Can you just use entry? Cause then you just only have one ciphertext component to get the same compression. Possibly, we didn't, yeah. I'm not sure how entry would work in terms of the AQO parameters, but that would be interesting if you could use that, yeah. Cool, thank you. Questions? Okay, let's thank the speaker again.