A few weeks ago, the College of Education hosted a panel discussion entitled, “Establishing and Managing Interdisciplinary Research Teams”. For those who missed it, it was very good and included an excellent panel of faculty members including Feng Feng Ke from Education, Neil Charness from Psychology, Rick Feiock from Public Administration and Policy and Gail Bellamy from Medicine. Below are the questions presented, and a summary of the advice given.

Question 1: How do you identify and recruit research team members from other disciplines?

• Establish trust through networks • Build relationships now, before the RFP comes out • Your students can help you with connections as they have peers working with other faculty • Look at the project, figure out what you need to get accomplished

Question 2: And how do you recruit external partners?

• Get involved with community organizations and government agency working groups • Immerse yourself in activities—interdisciplinary and with other institutes • Present your work through organizations. Be brave. Look up experts and contact them.

Question 3: How do you delegate tasks to team members during the grant proposal preparation process?

• As PI, lead the writing, create a draft, know the others’ language/lingo • You must lead, don’t just delegate—and make sure the proposal is written in a single voice • Get together, in person if possible. Build rapport • Try using “round robin writing” • Everything slips (timing wise). Make sure you have a buffer in your timeline.

Question 4: How do you keep team members on task as the research is being conducted?

• Regular meetings. Tasks and Milestones set. • Much reminding • Don’t just meet to meet. Show progress reports (peer pressure. Make sure everyone’s bosses are aware of the success of the project • Have hierarchies of command on big projects.
• Don’t let your teams fall apart. Have events to keep the group cohesive.

Question 5: What if they don’t behave?

• Confront your colleagues • If you have to, be prepared to cut out a node. • This is why you need to know people well BEFORE you ask them to be on your team. • Intervention – control the purse strings. • Budget for backup personnel if possible. You might be able to even use an advisory board member or a great grad student to fill the gap.

Question 6: How do you share information and documents among researchers?

• Email • Remember, you will need to communicate in the way the least tech literate person can work • Try to work with tech savvy people • Hire a student to take meeting minutes or get someone to take notes.

Final tips:

• Make sure your project is sustainable. Don’t collaborate with an outside entity and leave them hanging when the project ends. • Be responsible. Do reading in others’ areas. Make the effort. • Create small projects to bring people together before the big projects come along.

Interested in learning more? Check out the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ts13o-sOMU&t=2833s

Since last November, one of the things we’ve been telling researchers is to look beyond their normal avenues of funding for other possibilities. As it seems we will be dealing with lower federal research budgets (significantly so for some agencies), it is more important than ever for a researcher to diversify their funding portfolio.

One of the agencies we’ve been recommending faculty look at is the Department of Defense. While the stereotype of DOD is that they only fund research to make explosions bigger and jet fighters faster, the reality is that DOD has a broad research agenda covering everything from physics, engineering, and medicine to economics, communications, and social sciences. Nowhere is this more evident than in the annual DOD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) program.

MURI is a broad funding opportunity consisting of 24 different topic areas, most eligible for a maximum award of $1.5 million per year for 4-6 investigators. As the M in MURI implies, these are expected to be multidisciplinary teams, with faculty from a few different departments.

Over the last few weeks OPD and the Office of Research have been contacting those that we thought might have an interest, but anyone who is interested in leading or being part of a MURI team is encouraged to sign up on OPD’s FOCUS webpage.

The list of MURI topics is as follows:

Army Research Office Topic 1: Integrated Quantum Sensing and Control for High Fidelity Qubit Operations Topic 2: Novel solid- state materials and color centers for quantum science and engineering Topic 3: Controlling Protein Function Using Dynamic Chemical Switches to Modulate Structure Topic 4: Consolidation of Novel Materials and Macrostructures from a Dusty Plasma Topic 5: Embodied Learning and Control Topic 6: Coevolution of Neural, Cognitive, & Social Networks: Mind-Body-Community Connections Topic 7: Network Games Topic 8: Modeling Interdependence among Natural Systems and Human Population Dynamics

Air Force Office of Scientific Research Topic 9: Physically Viable Learning for Control of Autonomous Dynamical Systems Topic 10: Nanoscale Vacuum Field Effect Transistors Topic 11: Molecular-scale Studies of Liquid-Solid Interfaces in Electrochemical Processes Topic 12: Electromagnetic Non-reciprocity via Temporal Modulation Topic 13: Heterogeneous Interfaces: Route to New Optoelectronic Properties Topic 14: Piezoelectric Nanoenergetic Materials with Adaptable and Tailorable Reactivity Topic 15: Advanced Mean-Field Game Theory for Complex Physical & Socio-Economical Systems Topic 16: β-Ga2O3 as a High-Critical Field Strength Material for Power Systems

Office of Naval Research Topic 17: Predicting and Validating Pathways for Chemical Synthesis Topic 18: Synthetic Microbial Electronics Topic 19: Automated Technical Document Comprehension Topic 20: Materials for Smart Multifunctional Superstructures [(MS)2] Topic 21: Advanced Optical Materials that Create Force from Light Topic 22: In situ Microstructural and Defect Evolution below the Micron Scale in as-Deposited Metal Alloys Topic 23: Enhancing Thermal Transport at Material Interfaces Topic 24: Self-Assessment of Proficiency for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems

A friend of mine who works for the Florida Division of Emergency Management once told me about a concept that they subscribe to called “presence is a mission”. The idea being that you might only need DEM’s help when a hurricane rolls through, but when it does you’ll be glad that they’re around. DEM takes this to heart by making sure that they are visible around the state before, during, and after a storm.

The same thing is true for research support services. You might not always be writing a grant, or working on research project, but when you are you might need some help. We at OPD also believe that presence is a mission, so beginning this spring we’ve partnered with University Libraries to offer Research Support Office Hours. Office Hours is a drop-in consultation service that will be held every Tuesday from 11:30 to 1:30 pm, alternating between Dirac Science Library (Main Campus, second and fourth Tuesdays) and Foundation Building A (Southwest Campus, first and third Tuesdays). This way, we’re out on campus, rather than hiding up in Westcott!

Some of the things you can come ask us about are:

• Creating a literature review • Creating and implementing Data Management Plans • Proposal Editing Services • Collaborator Identification • Proposal Team Coordination • Examples of Successful Proposals • Strategic Research Planning

Hope to see you all there!

Devin Soper, our Scholarly Communications Librarian, can help you out!  He is an expert in using social media platforms to connect scientific communities and improve scholars’ online presence.  He provides one-on-one assistance as well as group presentations. 

See one of his previously recorded presentations here: http://bit.ly/2mA6upI or contact him at dsoper@fsu.edu.

I had the opportunity to attend two of Devin’s recent Social Media presentations!  Devin suggested seven important ways to develop or improve your scholarly identity.

7 Ways to Develop your Scholarly Identity                

1. According to Devin Soper the number one way to improve your online presence is to post your work to a public access site. Make your work accessible to your fellow researchers and the general community.  FSU’s research repository, DigiNole, is one of many amazing resources provided to FSU staff, students, and faculty by FSU libraries.  DigiNole allows you to post most work that has been published or presented at conferences or symposiums online for the world to view FOR FREE.  This is very important because professionals in the community may desperately want to apply your work to real-world problems.  If they can’t access your work, it can’t be used.  As you may know, many journals and funding agencies are moving in this direction, requiring work to be publically accessible.  Devin has a background in copyright and can tell you how to make your work available to the public without infringing on copyright laws.

2. Follow the Leaders! If you are unsure of which social media platforms to choose, look to the gurus in your field.  Which social media networks are they using?  Start following the leaders on different platforms, and then decide to start posting on only those relevant platforms that you enjoy the most.

3. Create Profiles! You can successfully sign up for multiple scholarly identity platforms with little maintenance, if you send viewers back to a main site or platform that you consistently maintain well.  Devin recommends three top scholarly identity networking sites: Acedemia.edu, Research Gate, and Google Scholar. 

4. Choose the mainstream social media sites that professionals in your research or creative areas use. Maybe your discipline uses Instagram because it’s more picture-based or Facebook because it’s more event-based.   Twitter is a top platform across most research areas, because it allows researchers to post nuggets of important information in a short amount of time, reaching a broad audience.  You can set up a twitter posting schedule, where you can spend one afternoon creating and scheduling twitter posts for the entire week or month.  Check out OPD on twitter @FSU_OPD!

5. Sign-up with ORCID! You need your research community to be able to differentiate your work from others with the same name.  ORCID provides researchers (and their associated work) with a persistent digital ID, especially important for researchers with common names. 

6. Make your work understandable to researchers outside of your field and to the general public. You must provide plain-language descriptions!  Devin recommends including two abstracts: the one with the science heavy information for your journal submission and a plain-language abstract to accompany work posted on public access sites.  Devin also recommends explaining your research using plain-language in a short video clip, perhaps using Youtube.  You should also add written statements to all of your online networking platforms in plain-language, understandable to the lay-person, about the significance of your work to the community or with the general publics’ interests in mind.

7. Check out the 30-day impact challenge (link below) to build a scholarly profile and then go back and decide which sites you want to use. http://blog.impactstory.org/impact-challenge-day-1-academia-edu/

We interviewed Dr. Debi Fadool, a professor in the Department of Biology and the Director and Associate Dean for the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at FSU.  She has read 100s of grants. 

Dr. Fadool served on the Ion Channel study section & the NIDCD study section for training grants and fellowships, both for four years.

Dr. Fadool recommended three crucial tips for achieving a successful career of grantsmanship. 

Tip # 1: Peer Reviews Before More Peer Reviews!

Before submission, Fadool recommends that writers ask at least three peers to review their proposal! 

Give a copy with a due date to:

• A junior faculty peer or prior mentor who knows your specific area and will give you the nitty gritty critiques on the details of the project
• An advanced student, mentee of yours, or an OPD editor who is a stickler for grammar and format
• A senior faculty mentor who will look at your work with the big picture in mind 

Tip # 2: Give Yourself (AND YOUR PEER REVIEWERS) Enough Time

Typically, in a NIH study section, peer reviewers will be given 8 or so grants to review with two months to review them.  It usually takes a dedicated day to read a grant and a day to write up the review…on top of their regular job!  So it may take reviewers 8 weekends to get the grants reviewed.  What if they have other plans…like life?!  Study section reviewers may get prestige for taking on the role and $200 for all of that work and time.  Your FRIENDS (you should call them that now) who agree to read your grant for free…just for you…need the same courtesy.  Give them time! 

Fadool recommends that you give one month to your peers to review your grant before submission.  While, they are reviewing you’ll still be working on supplemental pages.  You’ll also need one month to make corrections.  So that means that the review process starts two months before submission.  Sure, someone can occasionally squeeze a grant in by the deadline without allowing this much time, but that’s not how successful grant writers get it done! 

You’ll also need time to work on each element of the grant prior to asking your peers for their critiques.  Get advice from mentors, online resources, and OPD staff on timelines for completing the proposal elements (e.g., specific aims, equipment, personnel).  And ask those same “friends” listed above to hold you accountable for making each deadline.    

Tip # 3: Read Lots of Grants!

Why would anyone take on the responsibilities of a study section reviewer with such little financial and extrinsic rewards?  That brings us to Dr. Fadool’s third grantsmanship strategy tip [AND THE MOST IMPORTANT].  Read lots of grants!  Fadool says, “you’ll want to read a number of grants that were funded AND unfunded.”  OPD provides access to a secure database of successful proposals from FSU faculty.  Better yet, become a study section reviewer.  By reading lots of grants as a study section reviewer, you’ll see diversities of style and understand the tone of writing that gets funded in order to get your own work on par.      

CHECK OUT this video by NIH that gives you a front row seat at a peer review meeting. 

Also, checkout all of the previous workshops, slides, and videos provided by Fadool and her colleagues at the Office of Postdoctoral Mentoring, as well as OPD’s prior workshops and trainings posted online.

                                                             -Rachel Goff-Albritton, PhD. 

Rachel Goff-Albritton is a new addition to the OPD team.  She has a doctorate in Communication Sciences & Disorders.  She is passionate about locating and providing valuable resources to help FSU faculty receive funding for their research and creative endeavors, laying the foundation for sustainable research growth! 

Welcome back everyone! Hope you all had a happy new year and a wonderful break, but now that we’re back to school we’re also back to research! But to make that research happen, we need funding, which is the topic of this week’s blog post Fantastic Funding and Where to Find It! (sorry I couldn’t help it)

Helping you to find funding for your research is one of the primary goals of OPD, and we have a number of ways to do so. Many of you have probably been the recipient of one of our Targeted Funding Announcements. Every morning I get an email from grants.gov (the website run by the federal government that publishes all funding opportunities) with every new addition in the last 24 hours. This is usually a pretty long list, so I go through and weed out any opportunities that FSU isn’t eligible for (like foreign aid, or state/local government programs) or is an update of a previously announced program. With all the ones that remain, I read the funding opportunity description and pull out the keywords. Then, using everyone’s favorite Faculty Expertise and Advancement System or FEAS, I search by those keywords to look for FSU researchers who have publications or other grants related to that particular funding opportunity. I then send that opportunity to anyone whose prior work seems like it would be a good match. However, I don’t always get it right, and you may get an opportunity that you aren’t interested in. If that’s the case, I ask that you kindly forward it along to anyone that you may know of who would be.

If you want to be more proactive in your funding search, OPD provides the FSU community with access to Pivot. Pivot is an online database of both Federal, and many non-profit and foundational, funding opportunities. Pivot has their own staff that maintain the database, so it’s usually pretty up-to-date, and they also forecast opportunities based on previous cycles and agency announcements. One of the coolest features of Pivot is the ability to set up saved searches based on all kinds of specific criteria, and then get notifications via email whenever a new funding opportunity is posted that matches it. Pivot also has scholarships and fellowships for graduate students and post-docs, so be sure to spread the word to them as well.

If you’d like a personalized demonstration of Pivot, or would like help in setting up saved searches, call or email and we can set up a meeting! OPD also does Pivot demonstrations for faculty meetings or department retreats.

Finally, lately we’ve started to post a summary of the day’s new funding opportunities on Twitter. Follow us @FSU_OPD to stay up to date with these, and all other OPD news.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Now that we’ve made it through the fall semester, it’s time to take a much earned break. But don’t break too hard, Spring will be here before you know it! Speaking of spring 2017, there’s a couple of things to put on everyone’s radar, especially those of you seeking NSF funding.

First, NSF’s proposal guidelines are changing, effective January 30. We’ll be doing a more in-depth review of the changes, but for those of you familiar with the grant proposal guide, or GPG as it’s affectionately known, it’ll be a sad day as the GPG has officially been replaced with the PAPPG, the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide. Other than the name change though there aren’t too many differences, at least for you grant writers. The main changes are the addition of two new funding mechanisms (RAISE and GOALI), and clarifying instructions for the Collaborators and Other Affiliations Information sections. If you’d like to read over the changes yourself here’s the link: https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pubsumm.jsp?odskey=nsf17001

NSF also has numerous programs coming due on or around January 17th. Keep this in mind, as that date will sneak up on you with the holidays and the start of the semester. For those of you who are interested in applying for the NSF CAREER program next summer, you’ll want to plan on attending OPD’s spring CAREER workshop series. These workshops cover a range of topics, all centered around CAREER, including education and broader impact plans, evaluation, budgeting, and for the first time this year, coordinated pre-reviews by peers. Details and registration for these workshops can be found on the NSF CAREER Toolkit at https://www.research.fsu.edu/research-offices/opd/nsf-career-toolkit/. The toolkit itself is also a great resource for any potential CAREER applicant, as it includes a wide array of resources to help you through the process.

Other workshops for spring are planned as well, starting with How to Navigate the Research Offices given by OPD Director Beth Hodges on January 20th. This is a great one for anyone involved in the proposal process, staff or faculty, as it walks you through the roles and responsibilities of each office under the Office of Research. Staff from these offices, including Sponsored Research, will be available to answer any questions you might have.

We’re also pleased to offer a new workshop this spring, specifically focused on the aftermath of a rejected proposal. Those of you who have been in the game for a while know that rejection is a fact of life. This workshop will help with strategies for interpreting and addressing reviewer comments, and re-purposing rejected proposals, either for re-submission or future funding opportunities.

Finally, we’ll be hosting a workshop that will likely be of keen interest to all of you in the research community. Towards the end of the semester in April, OPD will be organizing Federal Update: Research Impacts of the New Administration. Any change in a Presidential administration will come with changes to the federal government’s research funding and priorities, though the changes could be more significant this time around. Joining us to discuss the potential impacts will the State University System’s federal relations expert. Details and registration for all workshops can be found at: https://www.research.fsu.edu/research-offices/opd/workshopstraining/

That’s it for this year! Happy Holidays to everyone, and we’ll see you in January.

Mike

Sorry for our absence! It’s been a busy few weeks here at OPD….

Before we get to the SBIR/STTR conference, I did want to take a second to say thank you and goodbye to one of OPD’s most valuable members, Kate Herron. Kate was our Research Development and Training Specialist for about a year and a half, and did a phenomenal job. I have no doubt that there are faculty members out there right now who will receive tenure and do great research, all because they met with Kate early on in their first semester. Kate has moved on to become an Assistant Director for Experiential Learning at the Career Center.

Last week I attended the 18th Annual HHS Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) conference in Orlando. It was a great three days of sessions with lots of presenters from small businesses, academic institutions, and HHS program directors. Many of you are familiar with the Department of Health and Human Services, but for those who aren’t HHS is the parent organization of some more well known agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control, and Food and Drug Administration.

So what are SBIR/STTR grants? Basically, these programs provide funding to move research from the lab to the market. They’re commercialization grants that allow you to take innovations from your research, and turn them into products that improve people’s lives.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, also known as America’s Seed Fund, are one of the largest sources of early-stage capital for technology commercialization in the United States. These programs allow US-owned and operated small businesses to engage in federal research and development that has a strong potential for commercialization. For example, the NIH SBIR program funds early stage small businesses that are seeking to commercialize innovative biomedical technologies.

The main characteristic that distinguishes SBIR and STTR grants is the requirement of small business involvement. For a SBIR grant, the small business must be the lead applicant, and the PI employed more than 50% of the time by the small business. For STTRs, a small business must perform at least 40% of the work, and the University 30%, with the remaining 30% split however they’d like. A STTR PI can come from either the university or the small business. I had two important take-aways from this conference:

1. The same things that get other proposals rejected get SBIR/STTR proposals rejected. I’m talking about things like unclear writing or half formed ideas, failing to address the priorities of the funding agency, not following the proper format from the solicitation, and not having a well thought out timeline and budget.

2. The business aspect of these is the most important. You have to clearly show that there is a demand for your product in the market place, that your company is a financially safe investment (within reason), and need to know who your competitors are.

Because of that last point, I’d strongly recommend anyone interested in applying for an SBIR/STTR to get in touch with the Office of Commercialization as soon as possible. That’s all for this week! Hope to get back into the swing of things now that the semester is winding down. As always feel free to call, comment, or email.

I have recently accepted a position as Assistant Director of Experiential Learning at the FSU Career Center – my last day will be this Thursday, November 17.  The Office of Proposal Development team is working on finding a replacement to join OPD and be on-boarded as soon as possible to continue working with our wonderful faculty.              

It has been an honor to work with you all – meeting you and discussing your exciting research and projects!  It is very clear that FSU has some incredibly talented and innovative folks!  It has also been an honor to serve alongside my wonderful colleagues, Patrice, Mike and Grace, under Beth’s leadership.  A team like that doesn’t come around very often.

All the best,

Kate

Pivot is an online database of public and private funding opportunities that FSU subscribes to and is available to all FSU faculty, staff and students.  To access Pivot, go to their website and create an account using your FSU email address and any password you chose.

The two main functions of Pivot are Profiles and Funding (both are tabs on the website).

Profiles:

All faculty have a professional profile built into Pivot within a couple months of starting at FSU.  Students and staff can also have profiles, but they must create them.

• After going to ‘advanced search’ and inputting keywords into the ‘search term’ section, you will get a list of names of people at FSU where something in their profile has triggered their name to appear. This information can be used for three purposes:
  • Collaboration: the list of name theoretically appears in the order of relevancy which means you don’t need to look past the first couple pages. The top-listed folks are potentially people you could collaborate with on research or creative projects.
  • Niche funding: If you research something very specific, having the list of names will allow you to look up their CVs, which allows you to see where they received their funding.
  • Targeted funding: OPD sends out targeted funding for opportunities we find

**Research and creative pursuits change.  Please update your profile at least once a year to reflect these changes!**

Funding:

Most often, faculty use Pivot to search for potential funding opportunities.  OPD offers free trainings, either individually or in groups about how to best utilize Pivot. 

• Click on advanced search and put in keywords
• Next, enter parameters. Generally speaking, I only put in ‘citizenship’ and ‘activity location’ for eligibility reasons.  Occasionally I will put in other parameters, but I don’t want to make it too unnecessarily narrow down my search.
• After clicking ‘search’, a list of funding opportunities will come up, which can be further narrowed down on the left side.
• These funding opportunities will list specific contact information, eligibility, the abstract, webpage, and all upcoming deadlines.
• You can ‘share” (aka email) a specific opportunity to yourself or a colleague.
• A main attraction of Pivot is you can click ‘save search’ for your list of keywords and parameters. You can have as many saved searches as you desire and once a week Pivot will email you opportunities that meet your requirements.  **The trick is to put the work in on the front end and then let Pivot do the rest**

Questions?  Please contact Beth Hodges.