UCR Research and Economic
Development Newsletter: Dec 15, 2013
Michael Pazzani
Vice Chancellor for Research
and Economic Development
Back Issues of Newsletter: http://or.ucr.edu/vcr/newsletters.aspx
Grant Opportunity Search: http://pivot.cos.com
·
Meetings
with Lewis-Burke (Funding Consultants) Jan 7 & 8
·
Keck
Foundation: Jan 10
·
NIH
Paylines
·
NSF
Acceptance Rates
·
UCR
Collaborative Seed Grants: Jan 28
·
UCR
Proof of Concept Fund: Feb 6
·
Sugar
Plum Fairy Recipe
·
Clark’s
Nutcracker
Meetings with Lewis-Burke
(Funding Consultants) Jan 7 & 8
UCR works with Lewis-Burke, a
DC based firm to identify funding opportunities and discuss funding
strategies. They will be visiting UCR in early January and have sessions
on various funding topics or agencies. The schedule is below. Faculties are
welcome to attend any session.
January 7
10:00 HH
4127 STEM Pipeline issues:
Outreach, recruiting, retention, K-12 STEM programs
1:00 UOB
220: Aging (including
biomedical, social and psychological research)
2:30 UOB
220 NIH, PHS Funding and
DoD Medical Programs
4:00 UOB
220 Programs and
Strategies for New Investigators
January 8
9:00 UOB
210 Earth Science,
Geosciences, Seismology
10:30 Bourns
A265 Department of Defense Funding
1:00
UOB 210 Funding for
research on water
2:30
UOB 210 Social Science
Funding
2:30
TBD
Department of Energy: Includes Office of Science and High Energy Physics
4:00
UOB 210 USDA and NIFA
funding Programs
We are still looking for a
room for the Department of Energy Session which will be in parallel with the
social science funding session.
Keck Foundation
Larry Page, the co-founder of
Google has said “If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science
fiction, it's probably not transformative enough.” Consider Amazon using
drones to deliver packages. How can drones help your research?
That’s the type of research the Keck Foundation is looking to fund. Did you
have an idea that is disruptive to your field?
The Keck Foundation offers
the opportunity to discuss potential proposals with universities before full
proposals are submitted. They foundation allows each university to submit one
medical research and one science or engineering proposals (seehttp://www.wmkeck.org/grant-programs/grant-programs.html
for details) If you are interested in applying to Keck for the upcoming
submission, please contact Rebeccah Goldware at goldware@ucr.edu as soon as
possible. An abstract of less than one page will help focus the
conversation and is needed by Friday, January 10. An ideal abstract might
be one that was declined by a federal agency with reviews that indicated that
the research is very innovative and exciting and would have a large impact, but
is too risky due to the lack of preliminary data or a disruptive proposal that
you haven’t submitted to a federal agency because it’s too early.
In my experience, the most
common reasons that proposals are rejected by Keck is that they are not
ambitious enough, i.e., an incremental advance over the state of the art vs.
creating a new paradigm.
Funding is awarded for
projects in medicine, science and engineering for research that:
- Focuses
on important and emerging areas of research
- Has the
potential to develop breakthrough technologies, instrumentation or
methodologies
- Is
innovative, distinctive and interdisciplinary
- Demonstrates
a high level of risk due to unconventional approaches, or by challenging
the prevailing paradigm
- Has the
potential for transformative impact, such as the founding of a new field
of research, the enabling of observations not previously possible or the
altered perception of a previously intractable problem
- Falls
outside the mission of public funding agencies
- Demonstrates
that private philanthropy generally, and the W. M. Keck Foundation in
particular, is essential to the project’s success. For example, they
don’t fund the type of research that the Gates Foundation funds.
NIH Paylines
Mitch Boretz forwarded me an
interesting graph from an upcoming book on NIH. The authors, Michelle L.
Kienholz and Jeremy M. Berg, analyzed funding in 2012 at several institutes at
NIH as a function of the percentile score. Essentially 100% of the grants
in the top X% are funded, none of the grants in the lower Y% are funded and the
probability of funding decreases between X and Y.
NSF Acceptance Rates in
2013
The
table below shows the acceptance rates for various directorates at NSF in
2013. Overall, the average acceptance rate was 22% with the lowest
division being EHR at 18%. These numbers are considerably higher
than most people believe. One reason for this, in my experience is
that NSF program directors have a vested interest in making the situation seem
worse so their division director increases their budget.
|
ORG |
Number of Proposals |
Number of Awards |
Funding Rate |
Median Annual Size |
|
NSF Total |
49013 |
10844 |
0.22 |
$116,403 |
|
BIO |
5937 |
1253 |
0.21 |
$141,119 |
|
CSE |
7821 |
1616 |
0.21 |
$150,114 |
|
EHR |
4501 |
793 |
0.18 |
$163,788 |
|
ENG |
10742 |
2217 |
0.21 |
$118,268 |
|
GEO |
6090 |
1568 |
0.26 |
$133,201 |
|
MPS |
8903 |
2201 |
0.25 |
$101,295 |
|
O/D |
583 |
273 |
0.47 |
$5,070 |
|
OPP |
3 |
3 |
1 |
$69,858 |
|
SBE |
4433 |
920 |
0.21 |
$50,011 |
One can drill
down deeper into the data to the specific program level at http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/awdfr3/default.asp.
Indeed, there are some programs with 5% acceptance rates such as NSF/BIO/IOS/
PHYSIOLOG & STRUCTURAL SYS which funded 3 of 63 proposals. However,
NSF/BIO/IOS/ MODULATION funded 30 of 79 proposals for a 38% acceptance rate.
UCR Collaborative Seed
Grants: Jan 28
The
Research and Economic Development (RED) is pleased to announce the
continuation of the collaborative seed grant program. The grants are
internal funds for UCR faculty teams to collaborate and publish in advance of
proposing multi-investigator projects and centers to external agencies.
This year, there will be two types of awards:
- Large Project Seed Grants: Enable a team of two
or more UCR faculty to obtain initial results or data to prepare for a
center grant, defined as at least 3 UCR faculty and 4 UCR graduate
students. Examples include NIH program project (P-50) grants, NSF Science
and Technology Centers, NSF Engineering Research Centers, DOE
Manufacturing Centers, NEH Summer Institutes, or USDA/NIFA Policy Research
Centers. Large Project seed grants have a maximum budget of $75,000
and funds may be spent from July 1, 2014-June 30,,2015.
- Small Project Seed Grants: Enable a team of two
or more UCR faculty to obtain initial results or data that will make them
more competitive for any peer reviewed federal program. A
typical Small Project grant would include summer support for a graduate
student plus supplies. . Small Project seed grants have a maximum
budget of $12,000 and funds may be spent from July 1, 2014- Oct 1, 2014.
Applications should be
submitted by Jan 28, 2014. More details are available on at: http://research.ucr.edu/ord/funding/opportunities/collaborative-seed-grant-program.aspx
UCR Proof of Concept Fund:
Feb 6
The Office of the Vice
Chancellor for Research and Economic Development announces the FY2014-2015
Proof of Concept for Technology Commercialization (POC) Award Program. The POC
award provides UCR investigators up to $35,000 to further develop a
commercializable invention based upon UCR intellectual property not yet
licensed. The effort should address a critical issue, such as creating a
prototype, scaling up a process, or obtaining additional data to support a
commercialization effort by making the invention more attractive to licensees
or investors. The award shall be used only for technical salaries and
benefits, supplies, vivarium or other facilities fees and contracted services
directly related to the project.
Applications should be submitted by Feb 6,
2014. For more details, see http://research.ucr.edu/ord/funding/opportunities/proof-of-concept-fund.aspx
Sugar Plum Fairy Recipe
If you are looking for
something to do while UCR is closed, here’s a suggestion from Sandra Lee:
2 parts Champagne
1 part plum wine
Splash cranberry juice
Gumdrops, for garnish
In
a champagne glass combine Champagne, plum wine and cranberry juice. Garnish
with a gumdrop.
Clark’s Nutcracker
I’d never heard
of a Clark’s Nutcracker until November. Gene Anderson told me that
they are frequently found at Onyx Summit near Big Bear, so one weekend my wife
and I went in search and eventually found a flock feeding on pine nuts.
(click to enlarge)
The observant reader of this
section will note that the last newsletter had a Lewis’s Woodpecker. Who
do you think the Lewis’s Woodpecker and the Clark’s Nutcracker were named
after?
Michael Pazzani
Vice Chancellor for Research
and Economic Development
Professor, Computer
Science & Engineering
University of California,
Riverside
200 University Office
Building
Riverside, CA 92521
Assistant: Johanna
Bowman