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Proposal Review & Submission

Acting in the capacity of the University’s designated authorized institutional official, Sponsored Research must review and approve all sponsored research proposals submitted on behalf of the University. This required pre-submission review ensures all proposals are complete and in compliance with sponsor and Northwestern institutional policies. When review is complete, Sponsored Research provides institutional endorsement of the proposal.

Sponsored Research Proposal Review

SR conducts a single review of all proposals focusing on the administrative and compliance components of the submission. Sponsored Research does not review technical components including scientific documents. For more information, see:

Proposal Deadline Policy

In order to guarantee on-time sponsor submission, a complete proposal package needs to arrive in Sponsored Research, ready to submit to the sponsor, at least five (5) business days before a deadline. All proposals are reviewed in order of receipt, and non-compliant proposals will not be guaranteed submission. Fully compliant, final, ready-to-submit proposals arriving in SR on time will not be deprioritized by late proposals.

Sponsored Research staff are not authorized to approve exceptions to this policy. Additional information is available here:

Institutional Endorsement and Submission to Sponsor

CERES System-to-System proposals are institutionally endorsed by Sponsored Research as the University’s Authorized Official and submitted directly to the sponsor electronically. Non-system-to-system proposals are also endorsed by Sponsored Research as the Authorized Official. The CERES funding proposal record should indicate to Sponsored Research how endorsed correspondence should be addressed and routed to the sponsor.

Sponsor Decision Timing

The average interval between the submission of a proposal and the award of a grant from Federal agencies is from six to ten months. Principal investigators should take this delay into consideration in planning for the submission of proposals.