Letter of Support Template
Description
The following template may be utilized and adjusted by OIT and Researchers when working with the Office of Information Technology Research Computing Team to create a letter of support.
How to Use
Contact the Research Computing Team in OIT by submitting a call ticket to HelpDesk.fau.edu (https://helpdesk.fau.edu/TDClient/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=4454) and request a consultation on your project. Consultation usually take between 30 minutes and 2 hours depending on the researchers' preference and involved discussing the researcher's interests and what their requirements may be. During this meeting, the research and OIT team will develop a basic set of requirements and create a draft letter of support and service description that meets the researchers and grant funding agencies need. Once all parties agree OIT will sign the letter of support.
Template
[Researcher]
Florida Atlantic University [School]
777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431
Dear Dr. [Researcher]:
As Assistant Director of Research Computing in the Office of Information Technology, I support the proposed study entitled [Name of Study]. During our consultation meeting we discussed your data management and computing needs and we can confirm the Office of Information Technology is able to support the study’s needs. [Describe data management and computing needs.]
[ Example Resource Descriptions]
Examples:
REDCap is a secure Research Electronic Data Capture service provided by the FAU Office of Information Technology for building and managing online surveys and databases. REDCap is managed as part of our Biomedical Health Research Informatics Core (BHRIC) initiative. Access to REDCap will be provided through the use of an FAUNet ID and 2Factor authentication. We will provide a courtesy account for the investigators who are at other institutions so they can gain access to the FAU REDCap for data management and data analyses.
The Biomedical Health Research Informatics Core (BHRIC) is an isolated and independently secured infrastructure managed by the Office of Information Technology (OIT). The primary purpose of the BHRIC is to support biomedical, social science or health-related researchers throughout Florida Atlantic University – particularly researchers performing biomedical research, translational research, and clinical research that may contain ePHI, as part of their data. The BHRIC provides 60TB of collaborative data storage replicated between the Boca Raton and Jupiter Campuses, highly available Virtual Desktop, Virtual Server, and Collaborative Research Environments. Services provided on the BHRIC include VDI, SAS, SPSS, MATLAB, and user and group drive shares.
The Koko high-performance computing cluster provides HPC, HTC, and GPU-accelerated computational resources to researchers and students at Florida Atlantic University. Providing 400 GB of storage and 2,200 CPU cores the cluster is offered free of charge with equal queuing priority for students, faculty, and staff. Equity users do receive priority access and queues based on the amount of funding provided.
If this study is funded, prior to data collection, we will provide training for your research team so they can fully utilize the [ insert the services ] for data collection, computation, and management. In addition, we will provide any necessary refresher training as needed during the course of the research study.
I look forward to supporting your study.
Sincerely,
Rhian Resnick
Assistant Director, Office of Information Technology
Enterprise Systems
777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL, 33431
Tel: 561-297-2647 / Fax: 561-297-0222