The Contracts Services team is structured to facilitate expeditious processing by a linear process flow. Our team includes:
- Subaward Analyst, responsible for processing amendments, FFATA reporting, and finalizing the execution of subaward agreements.
- Subaward Officers, responsible for drafting and issuing outgoing subawards.
- Contracts Coordinator, processes and conducts intake of new submissions for this team, secures any missing internal documentation from submitting departments, and creates our files of record as well as maintains our inbox.
- Senior Contracts Coordinators, secures all required signatures for the contracts officers negotiate the agreement, distribute the fully executed agreements to the submitting PI/department, creates financial awards, no-cost extensions and handles the associated file maintenance.
- Contracts Analysts, reviews and negotiates all non-disclosure agreements, outgoing material use agreements, and amendments to non-financial agreements, as well as secures all required signatures for the negotiated agreements and distributes fully executed agreements.
- Clinical Trials Officers, review and negotiate all funded and non-financial agreements related to industry-funded clinical trials, including outgoing subcontracts.
- Contracts Officers, review and negotiate all data use agreements, incoming material transfer agreements, non-financial collaboration agreements, and funded agreements Also draft and negotiate related industry-funded outgoing subcontracts.
- Assistant Director, oversees the contracts analysts, senior contract coordinators and contracts coordinator; as well as review and negotiate and execution of agreements
- Senior Associate Director, oversees entire Contracts Services team, the Contracts Officers report directly to the associate director, negotiates particularly complex or high-profile agreements, partners with internal Pitt Research offices to respond to internal and external requests, executes agreements
The Contracts Services team, similar to the other two processing teams of the Office of Sponsored Programs, allocates new requests for contract review on a constituency basis. Each department is assigned to a contracts officer, who is responsible for the review and negotiation of all new contract requests received from that department. This approach allows each officer to become familiar with the departments he/she is responsible for and the specific types of research these departments conduct. Likewise, this distribution of assignments builds rapport between the faculty and departmental research administrators and our contract officers. Find the Contracts Services officer assigned to your department.
In order for the Contracts Services team to initiate its review of a new contract, a formal request by the involved principal investigator (PI)/PI's department is needed. For non-financial agreements, an electronic submission is required in MyRA. For financial agreements, the submissions in MyRA and MyFunding capture information regarding the requesting department, the entity with whom we are establishing the contract, the specifics of the research project and any compliance aspects. As the information contained in the submission provides the context for our negotiation of the contract, complete and accurate information in the submission is essential to ensure that the finalized contract contains the language necessary to protect the PI's interests and those of our University.
Please note that the principal investigator listed on any submission submitted to the Contracts Services team must be an individual holding a faculty appointment with our University.