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[ucprof]

Have been reading the article:

http://chronicle.com/article/New-Budget-Rules-Say/130256/

I am not funded by NIH but am curious how it works for regular 9 month academic appointments.
E.g. if your 9 month salary is above the NIH limit do you have to prorate summer salary funded on NIH grants?

The only other agency I've seen cap salaries is NSF and they do it at the level of proposal/program.  Moreover I believe they work it out by just cutting PI effort level so that the total salary on the grant is below some cap.

Any thoughts or comments on this from the forum?

[mleok]

I don't have access to the article at the moment as I'm on the road, and VPN doesn't work too well off my 3G modem. From what I gather, the salary cap concept has been in place for quite a while, it's just that the 2012 budget has cut the salary cap by about $20K.

There is a discussion of how the salary cap applies to academic year appointees here:

http://www.research.ucla.edu/ocga/NIH/SalaryCapFaq.htm

The upshot seems to be that your pay rate is capped, and is unlike what happens with NSF with certain programs, where it is more an issue of total salary expenditure, which is addressed by paying you your usual rate, but reducing the effort level.

[ucprof]

Thanks for the link I see now roughly how it works.  It looks like they are counting it as a 12 month rate which means it would affect a fairly larger percentage of senior faculty in the UC system.  I've not seen a cap that low especially one where they impose it as the actual salary in contrast to the NSF way which is typically total dollars.  The 9 month rate at the new NIH salary would be around $134K. 

This would be a disincentive for faculty to take NIH money - at least if they are on the fence about submitting an NIH proposal vs. DoD, NSF, DOE, etc where such caps are not in place.