UCR Research and Economic Development Newsletter: April 23, 2016
Michael Pazzani
Vice Chancellor for Research
and Economic Development
Back Issues of Newsletter: http://research.ucr.edu/vcr/newsletters.aspx
Grant Opportunity Search: http://pivot.cos.com
·
TEDxUCR – TONIGHT** 4/23/16, 4:00-8:00pm
· Greatest Hits
·
Tufted Titmouse
The main point of this newsletter is to encourage faculty (and their
entire family and their grad students and postdocs) to join me in attending TEDxUCR today. It’s guaranteed to be better
than Netflix. Oh, I’ll also throw in some “greatest hits” from old
newsletters and one of my favorite bird photos ever.
Date:
Sat., 4/23/16
Time:
4:00-8:00pm
Location:
UCR Theatre
Please join us
for UCR's annual TEDx event on April 23rd, 2016 from 4:00-8:00pm at
UCR University Theatre! We are
excited to announce one of our featured speakers for the evening,
internationally renowned writer and scholar of religions, Reza Aslan. We
also have a wonderful collective lineup of 6 local speakers/performers.
This is an event you won't
want to miss and Dinner is included with the purchase of tickets.
Student tickets (for students
with ID) will be $17, and General Admission is $27.
More information about ticket
purchase, details about the event and our featured speakers are available on
our website http://tedxucr.weebly.com/reaction-2016.html.
We hope to see you
there!!
Speakers & Performers
Reza Aslan
is an internationally renowned scholar of religions and writer whose books
include the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Zealot: The Life and Times of
Jesus of Nazareth, and the International Bestseller, No god but
God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. Aslan
teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. His
writing has been published in The New York Times, Slate, The Daily
Beast, The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post,
and he makes frequent appearances on TV and radio shows as a religions and
political analyst.
Meng Cheng (Summer) is a 2nd-year Ph.D.
student in Management. Her research focuses on emotions, human behaviors, and
diversity. Summer is passionate about expanding and applying her research
interests through her volunteer work, and is active on the fundraising and
recruiting committee of the Student United Way Global Leadership Board.
Brian K. To
grew up in Los Angeles, CA and currently studies Psychology at the University
of California, Riverside with plans to pursue a career assisting the disability
community. Aside from his academics, Brian works for the Employment Development
Department of the state of California, serving as a Youth Employment &
Opportunity Program Specialist. He is also a student intern, artist, and
scholarship recipient for the Academy of Special Dreams, an organization
striving to increase awareness and provide opportunities to artists with
disabilities.
William H. Grover is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at
the University of California, Riverside. His research lab at UCR develops
instruments for biological, chemical, and medical applications. Dr.
Grover also creates smartphone apps and other resources for supporting
engineering practices in K-12 schools.
Lenka Morávková is a songwriter, sound-artist and
electronic producer from the Czech Republic, who currently pursues her PhD
degree in Digital Composition at University California Riverside. As a
cross-disciplinary artist, Lenka transgresses boundaries
within music, visual art, performance and new media, tours internationally with
her music project My Name Is Ann! and performs with
the Cristal Baschet instrument. Her
installations and performances have been exhibited in various places in Europe
such as: Broke L.A., LEM festival in Barcelona, Czech National Theatre Prague, Colours of Ostrava and many others.
Kristian Arceo is an undergraduate at the University of
California, Riverside, majoring in history, but with the intent to enter the
field of medicine. Kristian has practiced the art of Taekwondo for twelve years
and has received numerous accolades from local, state, national, and
international competitions. As a fourth degree black belt, Taekwondo has
enabled him serve in numerous ways from teaching in orphanages to raising money
to create care packages for the homeless.
Emcee, Stan Morrison is the only coach in NCAA history to
lead three different basketball teams, in the same state, to the NCAA
tournament – UOP, USC and San Jose State. He was “Coach of the Year” in 3
different conferences and director of athletics at UCR for 12 years leading UCR
from Division II into Division I. He is senior vice president, Pacific
Premier Bank, and a board member of Olive Crest, American Diabetes Association,
ARC Riverside County, Mission Inn Foundation, High Five America, and Boy Scouts
of America, among others.
HONING YOUR
PROPOSAL WRITING SKILLS
George A.
Hazelrigg, a program director at NSF has some hints on writing proposals.
Here are my favorite excerpts. See http://poole.ncsu.edu/i/com/weblogs/research-development/Honing-Proposal-Skillls-1.pdf
for more.
It should be totally obvious that the most
important thing a reviewer wants to know when he or she picks up a proposal is
what it’s about. Ergo, for NSF, the first sentence of paragraph one, page one
should begin, “The research objective of this proposal is...” In my experience,
any other sentence used to start the proposal results in a lower rating.
There are many words that, to reviewers,
mean “not research.” These include “develop,” “design,” “optimize,” “control,”
“manage,” and so on. If your statement of your research objective includes one
of these words, for example, “The research objective of this proposal is to
develop....,” you have just told the reviewers that your objective is not
research, and your rating will be lower.
Dr. Mark
Silver’s National Endowment for the Humanities Workshop Materials & Hints
For those that were
unable to attend or would like the slides that were presented by Dr. Mark
Silver (NEH Research Division) at the February 5th National Endowment for the Humanities
Workshop they are available athttp://research.ucr.edu/OrApps/VCR/Talks/20140207-NEH/default.aspx.
Helen Magid
collected some Hints from the talk.
· The NEH will offer feedback for many
proposals if they are provided a working draft approximately 6 weeks before the
final deadline. They do not read drafts for Fellowship or Summer Stipend
programs as those have a considerable number of submissions. (Each funding
opportunity has specific deadlines for feedback responses.)
· Applicants can submit to more than NEH
one program concurrently on the same topic. This differs from other
agencies such as NSF and NIH where duplication is prohibited. If you have
a strong application, this can improve your odds. You can only accept one award
if offered more than one.
· The NEH will provide panelist notes on
proposals only if requested by the applicant. These can help strengthen a
proposal when revising and resubmitting. You should always request these
even if funded.
· The NEH encourages reapplication of
proposals that are revised to take pane notes into account. All review
panels have 100% turnover so no panelist will see a revised application and
there is no need to mention that the application is being resubmitted.
· Letters of recommendation, which have
no page limit, are an excellent way to expand proposal content beyond page
limits in order to address the applicant’s capability but also to emphasize the
way in which the research or project is of intellectual significance.
For a complete
list of all upcoming NEH grants and deadlines please visit, http://www.neh.gov/grants.
Sometimes, little changes can have a big impact. Here
are a few fairly minor things I’d like to see changed about the UCR culture.
a. Grant Start Dates: Most federal
agencies strive to review proposals and make funding decisions in six
months. However, many faculty set grant start dates much longer than
this. For example, many faculty are advised by staff in their
department to start an NSF CAREER submitted in mid-July on July 1 of the following
year. To date this year, we have heard of three CAREER grants submitted
less than five months ago that will be funded. Using April 1 (or even January 1)
as a start date for a CAREER grant gives you access to funds earlier to travel, purchase equipment and
recruit graduate students and postdocs.
b. Proposals to companies: Unless
explicitly requested by a company, there
is absolutely no UC or UCR reason to provide a company with a detailed,
itemized budget. Indeed,
we have recently signed several six figure contracts, and one 7 figure one,
without detailed budgets. While it is required that there be the same
overhead on corporate grants as federal ones such as NSF or NIH, unless
requested, the company doesn’t need to know the details of benefits, tuition,
etc. Manycompanies care about the bottom line and it’s
not necessary to give the same details as federal agencies (unless they want
them). Companies also are not like NIH. If you tell them only direct
costs, they’ll assume that is the entire budget.
c. No federal agency, company,
foundation, market board (and likely no Dean, or Vice Chancellors) provides you
with funds to prevent one of your goals from failing. Instead, proposals should explain to a
funder how providing you funds will make one of their goals succeed. Of course, if you share that same
goal with funder, your goal will succeed.
d. UCR subscribes to a service by COS
PIVOT for searching for grant opportunities. It also contains a feature
to email you weekly with new opportunities that match a profile you set
up. See http://pivot.cos.com and use Save
Search. I’d like to see more people use the Save Search feature to
alert them of new opportunities. It takes 5 minutes to set up and might be
worth a million dollars.
Proposals Tips
I’ve been looking at some
recent proposals submitted by UCR recently and working on one of my own.
Here are some tips:
·
Include several photographs, graphs, and diagrams in a proposal.
These can include photographs of a lab, a field site, a outreach activity as well as graphs or data that
might appear in a publications. Approximately 40% of the NSF CAREER
awards submitted from UCR with illustrations were funded. No proposal without
illustration was funded.
·
Finish a complete draft at least a month early and allow
other in the department and colleagues at other universities to comment and
address their comments. I recently passed a proposal I was writing on to
people at 3 universities, and there was sufficient time to change the approach
in one section, to clarify several points, and to emphasize an additional
point. Often, the second version of a proposal is the one that is
funded. It’s better to wait a week or two for comments from colleagues to
produce the second version than 6-8 months for agency comments.
·
Have someone not familiar with the proposal proofread the
final proposal. Even after working with UCR grant facilitators, my wife
found about 20 typos. Little things, like “under way” vs. “underway”
inconsistent capitalization and incomplete sentences can form a bad impression
on reviewers.
The Road to
NIH Funding on YouTube
New to the NIH grants
process? Looking for some direction? Then grab a seat and watch our new YouTube
video, The
NIH Grants Process: the Big Picture, designed to help you get
started on the road to NIH funding. This video, produced by the NIH Office of
Extramural Research (OER), provides a high-level overview of the grants process
from application to award.
As you begin to navigate
the NIH grants process, be sure to bookmark grants.nih.gov for many more online resources. These include guidance on the
various aspects of the grants process, podcasts, webinars, policy
information, the NIH
Guide to Grants and Contracts, and so much more. More videos related to NIH
grants information may be also be found on YouTube.
Tufted Titmouse
The Tufted Titmouse was one of my favorite birds from New Jersey. They eat most bird seed but really like peanuts. Although there is a relative in the Riverside area- the Oak Titmouse, formerly known as the “plain titmouse” it lacks the tuft and coloration of the tufted titmouse.
(click
to enlarge)
Michael Pazzani
Vice Chancellor for Research
and Economic Development
Professor,
Computer Science & Engineering
University of California,
Riverside
200 University
Office Building
Assistant: Linda
Bejenaru
Email: VCREDadmin@ucr.edu