Staff Award for Excellence - June Wilson

June Wilson

Research Administrator Lead - (Pre-Award) - Division of Nephrology

Nominator, Jason Ceo -  "For June, exemplary performance is only not a matter of being great at her job. For her, it is in her Italian blood. Her performance is like a Puccini aria or a Caravaggio painting - unquestioned skill and unquestioned devotion to her audience. Thank you, June, for being the best pre-award administrator in the institution." 

Work Performance

June demonstrated exemplary work performance this past spring of 2021 for Dr. Rajiv Saran and his lab as they prepared their application for a large CDC grant.

Context: Dr. Saran had lost a large grant in the prior year that sustained his effort and also the employment of 2 research faculty and 4 full-time staff members. Winning this CDC grant had greater implications than losses of indirect costs to the division/department.

June's Actions Taken: This grant was rather complicated in that Dr. Saran coordinated for many contributor faculty from across institutions and disciplines, creating a complicated application for June to administer over. June put her extensive institutional and professional expertise to work by consulting Dr. Saran in crafting the application in a way that would both accomplish his scientific goals while building budget scenarios that would allow him to sustain employment for all of his team during a precarious financial period. As the application evolved, June continued to be devoted to Dr. Saran's mission through her consultation and helping him adapt the application as needed to optimize its competitiveness

Result: Despite strong skepticism in the likelihood of Dr. Saran winning the award, he won the whole project outright instead in part or not at all. Dr. Saran is now able to continue his scientific mission over the next 5 years and June mightily helped in saving the employment of several staff in our Internal Medicine community

Leadership

From Dr. Julie Wright:
 
June Wilson is an outstanding candidate for the Award for Service Excellence and has exemplified exceptional job performance is every aspect in which I’ve interacted with her over the years. June Wilson consistently goes above and beyond what might be typical job duties, in supporting faculty. She has volunteered to provide individual and group classes for faculty in our division about the grant budgeting process. She makes herself available to provide one-on-one support critical during the complex time periods leading up to and during grant submissions. She is a ‘go-to’ in our division related to any questions or concerns about rules, regulations, and grant funding processes even though her focus in on “pre-awards”. She works tirelessly alongside faculty, even providing mentoring support where needed in the logistics of grants and their submissions. Personally having had June Wilson assist me in preparing and submitting grants I believe resulted in our catching mistake within one of my grant applications that would have taken my grant out of the NIH review process had it not been caught; instead the mistake was corrected, the grant was submitted, and I was fortunate to obtain a score in the top 8% of all R01’s during the funding cycle—allowing me to be awarded an NIH R01 on my first attempt at submitting. Further, June Wilson is compassionate, and supportive and leads as an example of being a good human regardless of the stressors faced day to day. I fully and with no reservation feel that June Wilson deserves and has for some time, recognition for her excellence in her profession.

Customer Service

From Dr. Jeet Naik:

June is an excellent research administrator. Her impeccable planning ensures that you have various internal deadlines during the grant submission in your calendar six months in advance. Her resourcefulness, meticulous planning, and detail-oriented production ensure that grants are well put together in a timely fashion. You might say this is her job. So what? However, a recent example highlights why June is not your average administrator. She goes above and beyond what is required of her. In obtaining an investigational new study drug from the Netherlands, we faced a lot of delays due to confusion on which department within the institution would procure the drug and sign off on the regulatory and legal documents. June picked up the phone, called about a dozen people who had significant institutional memory to point us to the correct parties. This “go-getter” attitude ensured that we now had access to the study drug. Without June’s initiative, there is a good chance that this project would still be going around in circles.

Process Improvement

Process improvement for Pre-Award work in Nephrology has centered around calendaring/planning out timelines for our PI's and their grant applications and building in two-way communication structure for the PI's and June to adhere to. The whole point behind building in a lot of structure is to prevent late submissions that require much more back-end and rushed work that contributes to less quality work, time spent working outside of regular work days, and general stress. June has driven this initiative all on her own and has gained the buy-in of our faculty.