External Users

External Academic users

Our instrument rates charged to external grants are only 20% above those charged to UMN users. Staff time charges are closer to the rates charged to our commercial clients.

We offer exception by way of collaborative research — whereby grants directly subcontract our unit (i.e., federal funding comes directly to UMN). By doing this, external grants are charged at the same rates as UMN users for both instrument and staff time. Our rate sheet for academic users external to the UMN details these various pricing scenarios.

In any case, CharFac welcomes discussions of your research problem, whether it spawns a fruitful (in publication) collaboration or simply spurs analytical services or training for independent use. Beyond charging rubric, we are eager to establish collaborations for the sake of intellectual value.

Industrial (non-IPRIME) users

CharFac has three decades of history working with industry in a variety of contexts. Most commonly, industry collaboration utilizes straight contract work as one of our analysts uses a piece of instrumentation to provide analyses of your sample materials.

Charge rates are set to be consistent with the commercial analytical services marketplace, as required by University and federal policies. Any company can cut a grant (typically 1-3 years) to the University via proposal co-authorship with University personnel.

Industrial IPRIME users

We typically work with several IPRIME fellows in a given year on completely open, publishable/presentable research. A fellow has been designated by a member company for a given year to use up to $10,000 of a company’s membership fee in collaboration with an IPRIME principal investigator (PI). In many cases, the fellow chooses to allocate a portion of this funding for training and hands-on usage of CharFac instrumentation (at reduced UMN user rates).

Visit the IPRIME fellowship website for more information on how to apply and what the program entails.