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The Impact of COVID-19 on CCAS Research

Our first priority is for the health and safety of all members of the CCAS research community. In order to assist you in planning your research activities and  supporting your research teams throughout the current pandemic response, in accordance with OVPR, we strongly encourage you to:

Other important  GW sources of information are OVPR’s COVID-19 page and the Office of Human Research’s guidelines.

If you would like help with contingency planning, there are research and laboratory continuity of operations templates which have been distributed via email. Should you need a copy, please reach out to ccasres@gwu.edu. Once you have your  plan prepared, please share it with your department chair.    

Travel & Conference Organization  

In the light of the current restrictions on travel, outlined on GW’s COVID-19 page, we recognize that some of you will be facing costs for travel cancellations / rearrangements, conference fees etc. and we want to reassure you that the college will work with you to minimize this impact.

Cancellation Costs

    1. However these costs may eventually be covered, please make all possible efforts to minimize the cost of cancellation.  Please bear in mind that some things, like hotels, may be cheaper if cancelled sooner, but other things, such as conference fees, may be fully reimbursed should the conference ultimately get cancelled (e.g. waiting to see what happens for conferences scheduled in June may be the wiser course of action than immediately cancelling in the case of a non-refundable registration fee). Please also note some airlines are currently allowing waiver of change fees so you may prefer to retain the credit for future use. 
    2. If sponsors do ultimately allow cancellation costs, they will likely require that these costs are the bare minimum possible and are well documented, so please make every effort to minimize the costs and save email chains / receipts to show that you have done so.
    3. Scholarly Travel: For trips booked on college / department funds (Scholarly Travel, Enhanced Faculty Travel, Dean's Research Chair Awards, CCFFs, REIA), we will allow the costs of cancellation to be reimbursed by the originally planned source of funding for the trip. Reimbursements for unrecovered expenses will be handled by department admin staff as usual and cannot exceed what is reimbursable under your scholarly travel or other award. 
    4. Travel on external grants / awards: Sponsors are beginning to announce their guideline revisions in the light of COVID-19, after the release of an OMB memo allowing adjustments. Please feel free to work with your SRA on posting non-recoverable cancellation costs to grants as appropriate. Your SRA will work with OVPR to determine the appropriate way to handle each charge. Please continue to ensure that you minimize these non-recoverable costs, and document that you have done so, in order that we meet the OMB guidelines.

Conference Organization 

If you are organizing a conference / workshop etc as part of the deliverables of a sponsored project, please reach out to your funding officer to notify them of any disruption caused due to the current situation and seek guidance.

Extending Deadlines on Intramural Funding

  1. If you have funding from a Dean’s Research Chair or  an Enhanced Travel Award  we will allow no-cost-extensions of these funds, which were transferred to your department R-fund near the start of the award term. In order that we can keep track of these extensions, we ask that you complete the CCAS No-Cost Extension Request form.
  2. If you have funding from a Columbian College Facilitating Fund award (CCFF) or Nick-of-Time award designed to organize a conference or workshop, or otherwise support travel which can not currently occur, please also complete the webform and send an email to ccasres@gwu.edu indicating you have done so. We will consider no-cost extensions on a case-by-case basis. Please register your request for a no-cost-extension by April 1st in order that we can understand the full impact of COVID-19 in this area. 
  3. If you have funding for an Humanities Facilitating Fund (HFF) and/or University Facilitating Fund (UFF), they are controlled by OVPR and not CCAS and so enquiries should be directed to OVPR via their no cost extension form in Infoready.
  4. Standard departmental scholarly travel may be used to cover non-refundable cancellation costs this fiscal year, however unspent funds will not “roll over” into the next fiscal year

As the situation clarifies around which sponsors will allow cancellation costs, and how those cancellation costs will be handled, we will keep you updated via CCAS research updates. In the meantime, should you have an urgent question / request, please reach out to ccasres@gwu.edu.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation as we manage this developing situation.

CCAS Intramural Funding

Due to the current public health emergency we have paused all review and awarding of CCAS intramural funding for 2021/22. We will resume review, award, and notification functions as soon as we have sufficient information to do so. Those who submitted Enhanced Travel applications in Spring 2020, but who wish to withdraw those applications may do so via this webform.

At this point in time, the OVPR intramural competitions are functioning as normal with a deadline extension for the Humanities Facilitating Fund.

Relevant Information from Inside GW

Relevant Information from Sponsors and Other Organizations

We encourage you to bookmark and regularly check the following websites for the latest updates on guidance and resources: GW's COVID-19 website, OVPR's Impacts of COVID-19 on Research Activities and the CCAS Online Instruction and Accessibility webpage.

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