BMI faculty, staff, and students collaborate broadly within SMPH and across the UW-Madison campus. We look forward to supporting the research activities of faculty and research staff.
How to engage with BMI
If you wish to name a BMI employee on a grant proposal or engage with them on research projects, you will need to do the following things:
- Identify the correct BMI research administrator and notify her of your intent to submit a proposal. Do this at least 4 weeks before the proposal submission deadline to get the best support.
- Request a research consultation (usually PI or designee does this)
Complete the intake form as fully as possible
Add the BMI employee name in the “other” field if you know it
- Learn how to include BMI faculty, staff, and students in your research projects and budgets
Guidance – Including BMI employees on research proposals and projects
- Understand the BCG billing policy
- BCG fee billing and budgeting rates
- FY24 BCG fee used for billing: $12,751/FTE prorated for payroll effort and billing period.
- FY25 BCG fee to include in grant proposals: $13,134/FTE prorated for budgeted effort.
- NOTE: The BCG fee is recalculated annually, so the FY25 rate is an estimate.
Boilerplate Language for Proposals
ADP/Computer Services:
Biostatistics Computing Fees: We have budgeted $X in year 1 and annually thereafter (with 3% escalation between years) for computing services and software provided through the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at UW-Madison.
Research computing fees are included for project personnel at the standard rate charged by the Biomedical Computing Group in the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, prorated to cover the costs of research computing on this project. The fees cover high‐performance research computing tailored to modern applications and methods in biostatistics and biomedical informatics.
Computing resources within the Department of Biostatistics are provided by the Biomedical Computing Group (BCG).
The BCG maintains a network of ~110 multi-core, 64-bit Linux servers (totaling more than ~4000 cores). The facility currently houses more than 1.1 petabytes of enterprise-grade, networked storage configured in a redundant, continuously backed-up, and remotely replicated setup. Most of these machines are made available for compute-bound tasks by a locally developed software system called HTCondor. HTCondor automatically locates workstations that are idle and transfers jobs to them. The BCG HTCondor pool performs a bit more than five million hours of compute work yearly.
A full complement of up-to-date software tools are available, including R, SAS, Matlab, and Scientific Python for statistical exploration, as well as a number of optimizing compilers and a large suite of utilities. LaTeX and Word are fully supported for producing publication-quality papers.
The environment of the central facility is fully temperature-controlled and power conditioned and uses the UW Hospital’s emergency power system. Temperature, server functionality and security are also monitored by automated systems 24×7 that notify an on-call staff member if problems arise. Remote access generally makes remote repairs possible during off-hours.
All BCG-supported computers are connected to the Medical School’s network infrastructure and placed behind the Palo Alto network firewall. The Medical School Network Security Group (NSG) provides support of the Medical School’s network infrastructure.
Additionally, the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics is actively engaged in scheduled HIPAA risk assessments in collaboration with the Medical School and the UW-Madison Office of Cybersecurity to assess risk, compliance expectations and requirements, and to protect the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) of data being accessed or stored.