Customer Spotlight: Drew Speer

College/Unit: Substance Use Priority Research Area (SUPRA)

Department: UK Health Care

Describe what you and/or your team does at UK.

The mission of SUPRA is to prevent and reduce the burdens of substance use disorders through conducting and translating transdisciplinary and innovative research to inform clinical services, training and public health practice, and transform policy (https://www.research.uky.edu/SUPRA).  In my role as Financial Operations Manager, which I began in June of 2019, I perform or oversee all functions that involve finances for the HEALing Communities Study (HCS) and Women’s Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) grants and SUPRA.  This includes setting up vendors and contracts and making payments, Procard use and editing, JVs and budget revisions, cost distributions, research subject payments and imprest account management, eCRT review, progress reports and account setups, reconciliation, internal and sponsor reporting, and travel and Enterprise vehicle management. For SUPRA I purchase items as needed, track expenditures, and report this information to faculty leadership. Additionally, I create cost centers and do the budget transfers to fund pilot awards and faculty startups.  

Talk about the ways you’ve collaborated with ITS and how it impacted your work.

For both the HCS and JCOIN we have opened new regional office locations for our local community employees. In order to ensure these spaces offered the same internet speeds and IT support we worked with ITS to get the infrastructure installed so they would operate on the UK network. This both allows our staff in those regional locations to have reliable internet and printing access while also eliminating the need for us to identify and pay local service providers across the 7 different sites. Additionally, being on the UK network makes troubleshooting simpler as our desktop support IT group is able to handle problems internally rather than having to reach out to a vendor when issues arise. Finally, we were recently able to renovate the first floor space in our building, the Center on Drug and Alcohol Research (CDAR), and ITS worked with us to make sure we have all of the ports needed for staff and to simplify the network connections between the first and second floor. As we have faculty and staff from a number of colleges and centers, this work to streamline our wired and wireless connections improves our ability to connect to the internet throughout the building and identify the source of problems when they arise.