Research Support

The Office of Research offers support to faculty through pre-award services while applying for funding and post-award services to manage their funding.

Pre-Award and Research Development Services: Research Enhancement and Development (RED) Team

The Molinaroli College Research Enhancement and Development (RED) Team provides services to meet our faculty research and proposal needs from start to finish in the sponsored research process. Services offered include enhanced research development, editing of proposals, assistance in writing institutional sections of your proposals, connecting you with resources within the university to fulfill broader impacts and outreach, and coordinating large proposals and teams for proposal development. We work to streamline your proposal development from beginning to end by providing proposal timelines, checklists, boilerplate text, updated budget templates, composition of budget justifications, and supplementary documents.

Contact us for help with your submissions: grants@cec.sc.edu.

Starting Fall 2025, the minimum stipend for PhD students is 21k/9 months, or $28K/12 months.

Time	Action
8 Weeks Before Deadline:	Notify CEC Office of Research that you intend to submit a proposal / letter of intent. RED Team will set up meeting to discuss proposal specifics.
6 Weeks Before Deadline:	Work with the RED Team to prepare project budget, development timeline and checklist for submission, and review of solicitation.
2 Weeks Before Deadline:	Provide the RED Team with draft versions of your proposal narrative, abstract, and other documents for review.
10 Days Before Deadline:	Work with RED Team to finalize budget and budget justification. Provide supporting documents for budget such as letters, quotes, and required subcontract documents (Sub letter, scope, budget, justification, IDC Rate Agreement, and subrecipient form.
3 Days Before Deadline:	Final budget, justification, draft narrative, and any contractual documents uploaded into USCERA to initiate the internal approval process. Finalized documents uploaded into the required submission system.
2 Days Before Deadline:	Touch base meeting with RED Team to finalize any remaining documents required for submission. USCERA approvals complete. All proposal documents finalized and released to RED team by close of business.
1 Day Before Deadline:	Final review of all proposal documents and preferred submission to the sponsor by the Director of Research

Templates and Boilerplate Documents

Templates and boilerplate language can be used on CEC researcher submissions to help streamline and expedite their submission preparation process.

Broader Impact Resources

Server Resources for MCEC Faculty and Researchers

Windows and Linux server resources are available to MCEC faculty and researchers.

Server Resources	Monthly Rate
vCPU per core	$7.80
Memory per GB	$0.73
Storage per GB	$0.10

This includes enterprise backup with full VM and file level restores for up to 30 days. Cost is billed monthly.

Example: Windows Application Server

4 vCPU cores: $31.20
16 GB Memory: $11.68
500 GB Storage: $50.00

Total Monthly Cost: $92.88
Total Annual Cost: $1,090.56

Submit your request for servers

You may also reach out to your assigned IT support contact to discuss options.

Advanced Research Computing Options

For high computation, high memory, large data storge, or GPU computing needs consider the research computing offerings listed below. Feel free to discuss with your assigned IT support contact if your use case is appropriate for an MCEC virtual server or for Research Computing.

High Performance Computing (HPC)

The University of South Carolina High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters are available to researchers requiring specialized hardware resources for computational research applications.

Research Data Storage

The USC Research Computing DataHub provides medium-term storage for active research project data.

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