Tulane alumna and board member Elizabeth “Libby” Alexander (NC ’84)and her husband, Robert, have pledged $2 million to set up a fund to support faculty and the university’s research grant proposal development initiatives so that researchers can spend more time pursuing world-changing discoveries.

“After speaking with researchers and learning they were spending an inordinate amount of time on administration — putting grants together and doing follow-up reporting — rather than focusing on impactful research, we knew there had to be a better solution,” said Libby Alexander. “Lifting these administrative burdens will enable Tulane researchers to secure funding even faster and with a higher success rate than ever before.”

The gift will support Tulane’s newly expanded Office of Research Proposal Development, an office solely dedicated to helping faculty across the university prepare the best possible proposals for federal research grants from sponsors such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and others. 

“Research is at the heart of Tulane’s mission,” said Tulane University President Mike Fitts. “We’re so grateful to Libby and Robert Alexander for their generous support as we work to significantly expand our research enterprise across the university and across all disciplines.”

The gift will support research grant proposal development initiatives in the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the School of Science and Engineering, the Tulane National Primate Research Center, and elsewhere in the university, including cross-disciplinary research efforts. It will also help researchers in meeting compliance and reporting requirements for existing grants.

“If we can help relieve investigators from all of those different administrative tasks in proposal development, so that they can just focus on the science, we’ve done them a tremendous service and we’re enabling them to submit more grant applications to pursue even more research,” said Dr. Giovanni Piedimonte, Tulane vice president of research. “I think that we’re going to see some exciting returns on those investments, and some great science will be coming out of the process.”

Libby Alexander is the former vice chairman of the board of Cotiviti Inc., the successor company of her family’s retail and healthcare payment integrity business, Connolly Inc. Robert Alexander is the former chief information officer of Connolly.