SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

Ideas, new or old that equal better, faster, and cheaper for the organization need a place to be given life and funding. Every organization should have an office tasked with driving innovation throughout the organization.

Policy and research should be housed within this office, and the office should be also be tasked with gathering employee ideas and then turning them into new programs, projects, policies and research... more »

Having been an academic researcher before managing outside government research grants, I have seen that academic researchers applying for grants often make up extravagant salary costs in the budgets accompanying grant proposals, just to round to the maximum advertised award. For example, a professor earning $120 k/year might charge $195 K/year for her service on the grant. There is no hard review of these budgeted costs... more »

As a former academic researcher now managing external research grants, I have seen the shameful and growing dependence of research universities on indirect costs coming in though research grants. These supposed costs should cover the fixed expenses the institutions have in providing the researchers with support services, from office, to secretaries, to labs. These costs are fixed for each institution, ranging from 40... more »

When submitting budgets for research proposals, researchers try to allocate all the advertised award money. So, e.g. for a $300 K announced award, one sees proposals ranging from $299 K to $300 K exactly. In practice, these preliminary budgets rarely turn out to be accurate, and though expenses come up that were not anticipated, sometimes expenses turn out lower. However, the investigators conducting the research for... more »

A major bottleneck we have had at NIH for YEARS is the lack of communication between contract officers & scientists regarding the preparation of proper requisitions for purchases over the micro purchase threshold. Procurement is the fuel needed to maintain laboratory production & move scientific research forward daily. The ordering process for competitive & sole source purchases involves scientists, purchase agents, &... more »

Maybe if we made more of a commitment such as; funding, programs, research, improvement/quality, dedication, out reach, promoting, rewarding, sponsored competitions, awards, etc, we might be able to get some smart kids to become smart adults and fix some of these issues we have now.

A large number of federal research positions are located at national labs. National labs have a higher billing rate than most universities. (An example would be a 100 - 200% billing rate at a national lab vs. 50 - 75% at a university.) Locating the researchers at an American university will also allow students better opportunities to work with the agencies they wish to work for after graduation.

Undergraduate and graduate... more »

There are real medical issues that impact Americans; diabetes, cancer, AIDS and scores of others. With that in mind, why in the world would we consider wasting money on research with no impact on quality of life or the fighting of health problems? For example, the National Institutes of Health funded:

"The Association Between Penis Size and Sexual Health Among Men Who Have Sex with Men."

The study reported, among... more »

The Army, Navy, and Air Force each have their own research laboratory. These three research laboratories share many of the same objectives, such as:

Directed Energy
Information Technology
Propulsion
Munitions
Human Research
Sensors
Space Vehicles
Materials

By bringing these three labs under one DoD Research Laboratory, redundancy in research objectives could be eliminated. Furthermore, many of the directorates and programs... more »

Currently, the Institutional Review Boards of each VA facility creates their own form based on the federal regulations for human subjects research. Rather than having every facility reinvent the wheel, there should be one standardized set of forms that are used nationwide.

Furthermore, these forms should be migrated to an online system, which would save paper. The form for an average research study application in my... more »

The federal government, through the National Center for Health Statistics and Department of Health and Human Services, fields a number of national health surveys, including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), and National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Most of the data collected are publicly available and do not contain protected health information,... more »

Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have been conducted by researchers around the globe to identify common inherited genetic variations associated with the risk of many diseases. In order to leverage its resources to ensure that the advances in genomics are available to researchers and incorporated into rigorous population-based studies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has instituted a policy which states that... more »

OSD manages $3B per year in program funding. $1.2B is like research also performed in the military services (Army, Navy, Air Force). OSD and military use separate overhead resources (2%) to execute research programs. Transfer $1.2B of like research to military and save $24M through elimination of OSD contractors, payroll, travel and duplicated research projects.

There are 3 main benefits from boosting collaboration and increasing transparency within a governmental organization such as NOAA including increase public trust, reduced costs on training new lab members and/or students, and increased 'talk' between labs thus pushing the science forward.

With rising costs of more complicated experiments, increasing scientific collaboration is one of the hottest issues today. There... more »

Department of Energy national laboratories receive agency appropriations and funds from other federal, state or private entities. The management structure of most laboratories typically includes a for-profit partner. Laboratory management has successfully avoided fully disclosing its expenditures making effective oversight a challenge. By competing ownership of the laboratories (or divesting those in which the government... more »