Policies and Information about Core Management

Core directors are responsible for not only the scientific expertise in their core, but also for both short- and long-term planning for the core, supervision and mentoring of employees, rate setting, managing external contracts, ensuring timely billing of and payment from customers, vetting new technologies and methodologies, finding funding for instrumentation, maintaining service contracts, managing communications with core customers, and more. Specific Information to support the success of our core directors in these skillsets can be found in the sidebar.

Additionally, UNC Chapel Hill maintains an institutional membership to the Association of Biomedical Resource Facilities (ABRF) and it’s regional chapter the Mid-Atlantic Directors and Staff of Scientific Cores. This enables all of our core directors and staff to get access to the resources that ABRF has to offer online, including peer mentorship, seminars with both technological and business management topics, a Member Community forum, working groups to do original research within core facilities, annual meetings, and more. These are open to both directors and staff of any core facility at UNC Chapel Hill. To activate your membership please contact Kara Clissold at kara_clissold@med.unc.edu. 

The Office of Research Technologies (ORT) and Core Facility Advocacy Committee (CFAC) run several funding programs available to core directors, including biannual RFAs for equipment, method development, and general lab needs, institutional funds for collaborative financing of equipment or funds to support an external instrumentation grant, a voucher program for PIs and trainees to conduct pilot data generation in core facilities, staff recognition awards, travel awards, and emergency funds. All core facilities have a CFAC representative. We encourage core directors to develop a relationship with their CFAC representative, who can advocate for a core’s needs at monthly CFAC meetings and during RFA review meetings. If you are unsure who your CFAC representative is, please contact ORT at corefacilities@med.unc.edu. The Office of Research Technologies can also provide operational support for rate reviews, external audits, SWOT analyses, development of Rigor, Reproducibility, and Transparency statements on websites,