The Challenge
The New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is an R1 research university that manages over $190 million in research expenditures per year with a mission to promote the highest quality of creativity, research and innovation. Specifically, NJIT is focused on life sciences and engineering, sustainable systems, data science and information technology, and transdisciplinary areas.
NJIT had been using manual routing, spreadsheets and shadow databases to manage their research; however, this was an untenable long-term solution given their fast-growning volume of research. Investigator routing and approval took an average of 30 days per proposal to collect. IRB protocol submission, committee review, and committee communication took place exclusively in manual pdfs and in email. Conflict of Interest disclosure and review was inconsistent and difficult to track. Reporting on all these activities was virtually non-existent.
The Solution
In 2016, NJIT selected Streamlyne Research eRA to address their needs and help propel them to a higher level of research activity. Our partnership was successful, with NJIT achieving an R1 designation in 2019. Having implemented modules to manage pre-award, negotiations, award, subaward, IRB, COI and reporting, NJIT now has one single cohesive system for all of their research administration needs. Integrations to/from Banner Finance and from Banner HR were also implemented to ensure user access, investigator profiles, key budgeting data, sponsor data, and post-award details were kept synchronized without human intervention.
Streamlyne Research’s application layer runs in Docker containers managed by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This architecture allows Streamlyne Research to easily and quickly scale to the needs of the client. This also allows Streamlyne Research to ensure high-availablity by deploying containers across multiple geographic regions and AWS Availability Zones. Streamlyne Research’s database layer utilizes AWS’ Relational Database Service’s (RDS) managed MySQL server to ensure that the database is deployed in a highly-available and resilient manner while not compromising on performance.
The Result
Since implementing Streamlyne Research, NJIT has seen a 46% increase in external research funding. Their internal routing for proposal approvals are now much quicker, with the time to complete approvals from all investigators, their chairs, and deans decreasing from 30 days to four (4) days. Project-based Conflict of Interest disclosures are now electronically assigned, completed, and reviewed within the system, ensuring consistent compliance with NIH and NSF guidelines. All IRB processes are now automated as well. Best of all, officials now have access to detailed compliance and sponsored projects metrics via Streamlyne Reporting for the first time in the university’s history.
NJIT has realized significant efficiencies and reliability through the combination of innovative Streamlyne Research eRA software and the powerful AWS cloud architecture it runs on.
