The program, called Coeus, was first developed and licensed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. UNC bought the license from MIT in 1998, and in 1999 the University created a management team to customize and implement the program on campus. UNC is one of 80 universities to have licenses to develop Coeus.
UNC has not yet fully integrated the software, but officials hope to have it fully functional in spring 2002, said Barbara Page, Coeus project manager.
Page said the software program has three main components: the proposal development module, the proposal module and the awards module.
She said in the proposal development module, researchers will be able to use Coeus to create grants and submit proposals. The second component of Coeus, the proposal module, will contain information for every grant proposal that has been submitted to agencies for funding.
Tony Waldrop, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies, said the proposal module also will allow researchers to view their proposal's status. "Researchers can check that all approvals for their grants have been done, and they can see if they are missing a signature or anything else they need to get."
Page said the third part of Coeus, the awards module, will contain information about funds that have been awarded. She said the awards module will be beneficial because agencies often attach restrictions to awards, and Coeus will allow users to check whether they are compliant.
The Office of Contracts and Grants logs all proposals it receives into Coeus on a daily basis, and the program management team recently entered all award data from the 2001 fiscal year.
Page said more than 200 users, mainly grant administrators from academic departments, are using Coeus to track the grant approval process at UNC. She also said the management team is working on the Coeus Web site and is designing brochures to market the program.
Page said UNC is one of the few universities with Coeus licenses that is using the most recent version of the program, Coeus 3.7. "We are probably one of the most advanced users of Coeus that MIT has," she said. "We're on the cutting edge."
