Administrative Core

The roles of the Administrative Core include the enforcement of administrative policies and procedures that will effectively support the proposed research and the ICEMR program in meeting its goals and objectives. The ICEMR will be administered from two offices: one at the Malaria Alert Centre (a research center of the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences) in Blantyre, Malawi, and the other at the University of Maryland, Baltimore with the support of Prof. Miriam Laufer. Dr. Don Mathanga, who lives in Malawi, will lead the Amin Core from the Blantyre office. The Blantyre office will be the responsible for the overall fiscal management of the grant, budgets, hiring, procurement, administration of all research activities, and program management. The office in Baltimore will support the Blantyre office through the procurement of travel services, specialized equipment, and laboratory reagents that are not readily available in Malawi. At the University of Maryland, the Admin Core will be supported by Prof. Miriam Laufer, a co-investigator on this application and long-term collaborator (≥ 20 years) of Dr. Mathanga. The Administrative Core will ensure that all administrative arrangements and agreements with the district health management teams, implementing partners, and the Ministry of Health are enforced and that specific institutional review boards have given the appropriate authorization for research projects to continue. The core will be responsible for the management of the ICEMR inventory. The core will maintain and safeguard required documentation for the ICEMR, KUHeS and the sponsor (the US National Institutes of Health) including IRB approvals, evidence of training in human subjects research, quotations, invoices, and receipts. The Admin Core will also be responsible for coordinating the monthly Steering Committee meetings, the weekly Core and Project team meetings, writing the annual Progress Reports (and developing the attendant budgets), organizing the twice-yearly meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) (one ‘face to face’, one virtual), and for facilitating communications within the ICEMR, between ICEMRs, and with the NIH. The coordination will support the dissemination of research findings within and beyond Malawi.