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.