When planning projects that include multiple Departments or Faculties, the Principal Investigator should  liaise with Co-Ivestigators, Faculty support and the relevant Pre-Award teams to agree the required resources and any financial commitments prior to submitting the application to ensure all parties have mutually agreed objectives at the outset.

This is particularly important for Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) where a PhD student cohort may be distributed across several disciplinary areas. Thought should be given to the mechanisms for allocating supervisors, training requirements and sharing associates costs between departments.

One approach could be to:

• Distribute PhD income based on supervision records held by registry with no additional weighting for the primary supervisor
• Allocate annual costs to departments based on the proportion of registered students in the CDT
• Absorb administrative costs within the Faculty

For further information on this methodology, please contact Nazia Hirjee, Faculty Operations Officer for Natural Sciences, or Sophie Armstrong-Brown, Strategic Research Manager for Natural Sciences.