STEM Update #13: What are “Other Senior Personnel”?

Tuesday, March 12, 2024


Context: In my role as division director of IIS, I’m sending out a short message to the IIS mailing list on the Second Tuesday Every Month (STEM).This is the  installment for March 2024.

 

Hi all,

One question I’ve gotten a few times is about the category of “other senior personnel” in NSF grant proposals. I’ve dug into it a bit using a combination of primary sources and chatbots (!) and I think I can shed a little light on the topic. Let’s start with the “senior personnel” part and then get to the “other”.

 

NSF’s official policies are laid out in the “Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide” (shortened to PAPPG and pronounced “PAP-jee”). The current PAPPG describes senior personnel as “the individuals designated by the proposer/awardee organization and approved by NSF who contribute in a substantive, meaningful way to the scientific development or execution of a research and development project proposed to be carried out with a research and development award." 

 

So, senior personnel contribute to the research. They are required to do training on the responsible and ethical conduct of research, are included in the appropriate budget documents, have their biosketches in the proposal, and are eligible for “facilitation awards”. There are rules for reporting when they leave the project. Solicitations quite often list restrictions on how many and what type of proposals an individual person can participate in as a senior person. (I was surprised to find that the PAPPG uses “senior person” as the singular of “senior personnel”. I guess it makes sense, but it sounds weird to me and seems easily misinterpreted. Shrug.)

 

A special category of senior personnel are the principal investigators (PIs) and co-principal investigators (co-PIs). They are listed explicitly as such in the proposal. The current PAPPG says they “will be jointly responsible for submission of the requisite project reports”. In preparing the proposal, “authors other than the PI (or any co-PI) must be named and acknowledged.” Regarding implications of the PI and co-PIs labels, it says “NSF does not infer any distinction in scientific stature among multiple PIs, whether referred to as PI or co-PI.” The main difference is that the PI is the person “with whom all communications between NSF program officials and the project relating to the scientific, technical, and budgetary aspects of the project should take place. ”

 

So, when NSF refers to “other senior personnel”, it just means “senior personnel other than the PI and co-PIs.” Why so many questions, then? I think where it gets complicated is in this topic of “stature”. The PAPPG explicitly says no stature distinction is inferred between PI and co-PI. But it doesn’t say anything one way or the other for (co-)PIs vs. other senior personnel. Complicating things further, there is a cap of four on the number of co-PIs that can be listed in a proposal, so sometimes proposers need to make hard choices about who to list as co-PIs and who to include as other senior personnel. (There’s no limit on the size of this second category.) All that said, from an NSF policy perspective, the difference between co-PIs and other senior personnel looks pretty minor to me. Especially on big projects, NSFers are keenly aware that there are some folks that have significant scientific and leadership responsibility that end up on the “other” list. I think some of the distinctions between the roles are being made outside of NSF; as such, the strategic questions about who to list in each category aren’t really NSF questions at all. If that’s what you were hoping I’d elucidate, there’s not much I can do. Sorry…!

 

I’ve heard chatter about changing the policy to allow for more than four co-PIs per project, but that’s not the case at present.

 

Until next time!

 

 -Michael

 

P.S. As always, please consult the PAPPG for the official policy: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2022-10/nsf23_1.pdf .