UCR Research and Economic
Development Newsletter: July 10, 2013
Michael Pazzani
Vice Chancellor for Research
and Economic Development
Back Issues of Newsletter: http://or.ucr.edu/vcr/newsletters.aspx
·
NSF
CAREER Proposals
·
Welcome
Helen Magid, Foundation Grant Writer
·
Keck
Foundation
·
NSF
Operating Plan for FY 2013
·
NIH
Funding for 2014?
·
White-Headed Woodpecker and Green-Tailed Towhee
NSF CAREER Proposals
If you are
planning to submit a NSF CAREER award later this month, you can increase your
chances of being funded by working with a grant facilitator (Randy Black at randall.black@ucr.edu, Mitch Boretz (BCOE) mitch@engr.ucr.edu, Mike Mueller (CNAS) michael.mueller@ucr.edu. The web site
http://research.ucr.edu/OrApps/RD/proposals/Default.aspx
also has sample proposals, sample Chair’s letters,
and information on broader impacts and educational plans. See also http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11038/nsf11038.jsp at NSF for frequently asked questions about the CAREER
award.
In my experience,
the most common reasons that NSF CAREER awards are declined are:
·
The proposal is a loosely connected series of projects without a
unifying goal.
·
The proposal fails to distinguish between the existing research
and the proposed research of the investigator and places more emphasis on what
has been accomplished rather than the ambitious project that WILL be
accomplished if funded.
·
The education plan is not well integrated into the proposal.
It should be mentioned in the first page and integrated into the
timeline. It should focus on a plan to integrate your research with education
in UCR’s degree granting programs.
·
The education plan and the broader impacts are not separate and
distinct. The broader impacts might include outreach to K-12, efforts to
increase diversity of students pursuing undergraduate or graduate degree programs,
the impact of your research on society, or the potential for your research to
be the foundation for commercial products.
Welcome
Helen Magid, Foundation Grant Writer
In
cooperation with the Research and Economic Development Office, UCR Advancement
has hired Helen Magid as a Foundation Grant Writer. In addition to
helping to write grants to foundations, Helen will also assist faculty with
proposals to the National Endowment for The Humanities and the National
Endowment for the Arts. Her bio is below.
For
the past five years, Helen has served as the manager of development and
communications for the Los Angeles Education Partnership, an organization that
helps students in high-need schools improve their academic achievement by
partnering with educators, parents and the community. In her role, she
helped develop proposals and secure funding through multiple granting agencies,
managed communications, and planed various fundraising events. Helen has
also held the position of adjunct professor of writing (screenwriting, fiction,
and non-fiction). She is deeply influenced by the humanities in the UC
system as she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from the University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theater from
the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Her
office is in Hinderaker Hall 1120B and you can reach her at extension
951-827-7143 or at Helen.magid@ucr.edu
Keck Foundation
The Keck Foundation offers
the opportunity to discuss potential proposals with universities before full
proposals are submitted. If you are interested in applying to Keck this
winter, please contact Rebeccah Goldware at rebeccah.goldware@ucr.edu as soon
as possible. An abstract of less than one page will help focus the
conversation and is needed by July 21. 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 transformative 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
NSF
Operating Plan for FY 2013
NSF finally has an operating plan for this year. See http://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/113/highlights/cu13_0409.jsp. NSF's total funding for FY2013 is just under $6.9 billion. By comparison, NSF's FY 2012 level was $7.0 billion. While this isn’t great, it is much better than the worst case scenarios feared earlier in the year.
NIH
Funding for 2014?
Federal spending on the
National Institutes of Health would increase by $307-million under an
appropriations bill for the 2014 fiscal year that was approved by a Senate
panel on Tuesday.
…
Over all, the bill would
be slightly less generous to research … than President Obama's budget, which
would provide $31.3-billion for the National Institutes of Health (compared
with the bill's $30.955-billion)…
Still, the legislation
is much more generous than the equivalent bill in the House of Representatives
is likely to be, given that chamber's budget blueprint. The House set aside
$121.8-billion for labor, health, and education programs, almost 26 percent
less than the Senate did. If that difference were applied evenly, the National
Institutes of Health would get $8-billion less under the House bill than in the
Senate's version.
If House members spared
certain programs, they would have to cut more deeply elsewhere. Either way,
reconciling the competing measures will be difficult.
During Tuesday's
session, the Appropriations Committee's chairwoman, Sen. Barbara Mikulski,
Democrat of Maryland, vowed to bring the education-spending bill to the floor
for the first time since 2007. In every year since then, the bill has been
wrapped into an "omnibus" spending measure containing several other
bills.
White-Headed Woodpecker and Green-Tailed Towhee
A few weekends ago, my wife
and I went to Grassy Hollow Visitor Center near Wrightwood, CA with Norm
Ellstrand and Tracy Kahn. I was happy to add two birds to my life list:
the White-Headed Woodpecker and the Green-Tailed Towhee. I looked for the
towhee a few times this year near the UCR Botanic Gardens and was never able to
find it.
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: Jennifer
Vazquez
951-827-4800