Grad Student Travel to Workshop

[math...@umn.edu]

A grad student in our department traveled to a week long workshop in Indiana. The justification the PI gave is:

"This is a week-long workshop (not really a conference) in which beginning graduate students learn through hands-on problem sets the fundamentals of mathematics used in nonlinear optics research. This is at the heart of her thesis research and the research supported by this NSF DMR award."

The NSF project being charged is not a training grant. Would this be an allowable travel charge on a standard NSF research grant?

[andrewca...@gmail.com]

I would consider this an unallowable expense on the NSF grant. You could charge this to the PIs non-sponsored funding. This appears to have been a training related workshop that most benefits the individual. NSF generally does not allow direct charging training related expense to research awards. Exceptions would be if participants are involved, or if the award is a training grant.