UC Merced Magazine | Volume XIX, Issue VII

I’m a Bobcat forever. — Ana Becerril

Preston-Nelson said the tracker helps complete the picture and tell the story of UC Merced’s groundbreaking research efforts. “She stepped up big time for this,” Schnier said of Preston Nelson. “Yes, this is a success story for faculty and research, but her commitment to documenting what was happening was incredible.” R1 and … Next? Dumont remembered a meeting with the School of Natural Sciences faculty when she was its dean. “What do we need to do to be R1?” someone asked. “I said, ‘You need to keep doing what you’re doing,’” she replied. All of UC Merced’s faculty members are “just amazing,” Dumont added. “Top-notch, world-class researchers, scholars and artists.” Indeed. More than 40 UC Merced researchers have earned CAREER awards, a prestigious honor from the National Science Foundation given to untenured faculty members. Recent research grants include $18.1 million to the region’s education and health care needs and $12.5 million to establish a Biology Integration Institute. The journey continues. Like the R2 classification less than a decade earlier, UC Merced’s arrival among Carnegie’s top-tier research institutions is significant on several fronts. “It’s an amazing accomplishment in such a short period of time,” Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Economic Development Gillian Wilson said, “but it’s just the beginning. It’s opening all sorts of doors for research funding, for discoveries, for education and impact on the Valley.”

Amid this transition, Preston-Nelson, an associate vice chancellor and UC Merced’s controller — the head of Business and Financial Services — was asked to lead an e ort to use the new system’s accounting muscle to better track UC Merced’s research transactions. Was the university identifying and categorizing all the spending that supports research? e old financial tracking system struggled to handle this, but the Oracle system was born to it, built on a vast chart of accounts that a user strings together like DNA proteins. It could be done, but the task required someone like Preston-Nelson who had mastered the Oracle system’s capabilities. “I sat down with Amanda and we talked about it,” said Vice Chancellor Kurt Schnier, UC Merced’s chief financial officer. “And she developed a procedure.” e solution uses the chart of accounts to make numerous types of research-related transactions easier to identify. If a sta member or lab worker enters a research expenditure, the Oracle system requires the related project to be categorized by a long list of research types. e spending tracker ensures the university counts research expenditures fully and provides data to agencies that track it, such as the National Science Foundation. Working with Sponsored Projects Office Executive Director Jue Sun and Graduate Division Assistant Dean Eric Cannon, Preston-Nelson built a tracker that’s second to none in the UC system, strengthening UC Merced’s position as an institution conducting research at the Carnegie R1 level.

15

UC MERCED MAGAZINE // ucmerced.edu