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UCR
Research and Economic Development Newsletter
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Vice
Chancellor for Research and Economic Development
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· CORRECTION: Limited Submission:
Brain Research Foundation 2018 Fay/Frank Seed Grant
· USDA Presentation with Irma
Lawrence - October 27, 2017
· Why was my NSF
Proposal declined?
· Visit by NSF CISE Assistant
Director: An Expanding and Expansive View of Computing
· Honing your Proposal Writing
Skills
· Visit by Vipin
Chaudhary from NSF - October 30, 2017
· NSF Call for Science and
Technology Centers
· ORI Seminar Series: The Common
Rule Revisions
· Reminder: Research Lunches
· Center for Advanced Neuroimaging
User Meeting - December 1, 2017
· Baby Flamingo
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CORRECTION:
Limited Submission: Brain Research Foundation 2018 Fay/Frank Seed
Grant
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In the
last newsletter, we concentrated so much on the format that we didn't notice we provided info from Penn
State on how to apply. We've
updated it to include the UCR process.
· Internal Submission
Deadline: Friday, November 17, 2017
· Funding Organization's
Deadline: Monday, January 8, 2018
· Award Cycle: 2018
· Discipline/Subject Area: Neuroscience Research
· Eligibility: Full-time Assistant or
Associate Professor working in the area of brain function
· Apply at https://research.ucr.edu/ord/limitedsubmissions.aspx
Brain
Research Foundation has invited eligible US institutions
to nominate one faculty member (Assistant or Associate Professor) to
submit a Letter of Intent (LOI) for the Fay/Frank Seed Grant
Program.
Brain
Research Foundation’s Annual Seed Grant Program was initiated in 1981. The purpose of our
program is to provide start-up monies for new research projects
in the field of neuroscience that will likely lead to extramural
funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or other
outside funding sources.
Objectives: The objective of the BRF Seed
Grant Program is to support new and innovative projects,
especially those of junior faculty, who are working in new
research directions. BRF Seed Grant awards are
not intended to supplement existing grants.
Funding and award period: Each total grant is limited to
$80,000 (direct costs) for a two year
grant period. The first grant payment of $40,000 will be made upon completion of the Seed Grant
Acceptance Form (June 2018). The final payment of $40,000 will be made contingent upon receipt of a
Preliminary Progress and Financial Report (June 2019). Funds must be utilized within the grant period.
1.)
Funding is to be directed at pilot research projects that are
both innovative and will likely lead to successful grant
applications to NIH and other public and private funding
entities.
2.)
Assistant Professor – Junior faculty with a new research project
that will generate pilot data that will lead to RO1 funding or a
comparable outside grant will be first priority. Must provide
abstract and specific aims for current grants and indicate if
there is any overlap.
3.) Associate
Professor – Faculty who are pursuing new research
directions. Must explain how the project is a new research
direction. Must provide abstract and specific aims for current
grant(s) and indicate if there is any overlap.
4.) A
new technique is not considered a new
direction unless it pertains to a different area of study.
5.) Seed
Grants are NOT to be used for bridge
funding between grants.
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USDA
Presentation with Irma Lawrence
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Irma
Lawrence, National Program Leader for the USDA HIS Education
Grants Program, will visit UCR on October 27, 2017. During her
time on campus, she will give a presentation on current USDA
initiatives and opportunities from 11:00-12:30pm in Campbell
Lab/University Lab Building, Room 101.
Irma is
passionate about diversifying the aging USDA workforce and
encourages underrepresented students to apply for USDA
internships that often lead to permanent jobs. She is very
interested in expanding the pipeline from UCR to USDA/NIFA
because she has only recently recognized UCRs diverse student
body and our world class faculty in
plant biology, entomology, and microbiology (and other areas that
she is currently unaware of).
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Why was my NSF proposal declined?
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Recently,
we went through the reviews of some NSF proposals from last year.
Here are some comments on the intellectual merit. Avoiding
these mistakes will increase the chances of acceptance.
· Because the topic is similar to
some of the work from the PI's past graduate/postdoc work, I
suggest that the PI articulate how the proposed work represents a
new and independent direction from past work with mentors.
· The rationale for the expected
relationship … was not richly described or grounded in
relevant literature
· More thought seems needed on the
plan for gathering and analyzing data
· There was some concern that the
planned experiments did not map directly to the hypotheses
outlined
· My only serious criticism of the
proposal (which is why I rated it as "very good" rather
than "excellent") is that the topic of focus … does not
seem to be particularly well-motivated lack of detail in the
description of the experiments…,
· lack of justifications
some of the experimental conditions
· A minor weakness is the lack of
detail
· The proposal rests on a great
deal of speculation.
· there are already many similar
reports in literature
· The concepts are not new and
some of them are from the PI's previous postdoc work a few years
ago
· The proposed work, however, is
not completely novel.
· The research topic is not theoretically grounded in the
literature.
· While many details are
included in the proposed approach, it is not entirely clear how…
· The innovation of this proposal
is modest
· The panel noted few
weaknesses on Intellectual Merit; however, the proposal would
have benefited from careful proofreading.
· The proposed experiments
on … were considered short on preliminary data and lacking
appropriate controls.
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Visit by
NSF CISE Assistant Director: An Expanding and Expansive View of
Computing
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Speaker: Jim Kurose (Distinguished Lecture Series)
Affiliation: National Science Foundation
Date: Friday, October 27, 2017
Advances
in computer and information science and engineering are providing
unprecedented opportunities for research and education. My talk
will begin with an overview of CISE activities and programs at
the National Science Foundation and include a discussion of
current trends that are shaping the future of our discipline. I
will also discuss the opportunities as well as the challenges
that lay ahead for our community and for CISE.
Dr. Jim
Kurose is the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation
(NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
(CISE). He leads the CISE Directorate, with an annual budget of
more than $900 million, in its mission to uphold the nation's
leadership in scientific discovery and engineering innovation
through its support of fundamental research in computer and
information science and engineering, state-of-the-art
cyberinfrastructure, and education and workforce
development.
Dr. Kurose
is on leave from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where
he is a Distinguished Professor in the College of Information and
Computer Sciences. He has served in a number of administrative
roles at UMass and has been a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research;
INRIA; Institut EURECOM; the University
of Paris; the Laboratory for Information, Network and
Communication Sciences; and Technicolor Research Labs.
His
research interests include network protocols and architecture,
network measurement, sensor networks, multimedia communication,
and modeling and performance evaluation. Dr. Kurose has served on
many national and international advisory boards and panels and
has received numerous awards for his research and teaching. With
Keith Ross, he is the co-author of the textbook, Computer
Networking, a top down approach (6th edition) published by
Addison-Wesley/Pearson.
Dr. Kurose
received his Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University
and a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Wesleyan
University. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers (IEEE).
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Honing
Your Proposal Writing Skills
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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.
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Visit by
Vipin Chaudhary from NSF - October 30,
2017
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Vipin Chaudhary from NSF will be
visiting UCR on October 30, 2017. Chaudhary will be giving
two talks while at UCR:
CSE colloquium: "Opportunities for
Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in Science and
Engineering"
11:10-12:00pm, Bourns A125
Business School colloquium: "“NSF Innovation
Corps (I-Corps™): Preparing Scientists and Engineers to
Accelerate the Economic and Societal Benefits”
5:40-7:10pm, Anderson Hall 118
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NSF Call
for Science and Technology Centers
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The
National Science Foundation issues a call for the Science and
Technology Centers every few years. These are typically $5M a
year for 5 Years (renewable for another 5). When the call comes
out, it's too late to put a team
together, so NOW is a good to time to think about something
ambitious. Below are summaries of the last STCs awarded in 2016.
Accelerators
are important scientific tools that use beams of charged
particles to investigate particle physics. This center's
overarching research goal is to decrease the cost of key
accelerator technologies while simultaneously increasing the
intensity ("brightness") of charged particle beams by
two orders of magnitude (roughly 100 times more intense). This
STC will contribute to scientific advances in many disciplines,
ranging from physics, to chemistry, to biology, by enhancing
accelerator capabilities. The center will
partner Cornell University with the University of Chicago;
Chicago State University; the University of California, Los
Angeles; the University of Florida; the University of Maryland;
Brigham Young University; Morehouse College; Clark Atlanta
University; the University of Toronto; the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory; the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory; and TRIUMF (Canada's national laboratory for particle
and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science).
Cell biology
is a rapidly expanding field of science that explores the
structure and properties of cells, yielding revolutionary
discoveries in biology. This center's goal is to transform cell
biology into a discipline that uses tools from engineering, and
the physical and computer sciences to generate a greater
understanding of the rules that govern cell behavior, while also
enabling the design of cells that have useful functions. The
center will develop tools to predict, design and test the impact
on cellular function of changes to their internal organization.
It will also create tools for building multicellular and
multi-organism structures and develop living
"bioreactors" that will generate products of commercial
value. This STC will partner the
University of California, San Francisco with University of
California, Berkeley; San Francisco State University; Stanford
University; the IBM Almaden Research
Center; and the Exploratorium.
Mechanobiology is a field that focuses on how
forces influence plant and animal systems. This center's mission
is to discover the principles that govern how biological systems
communicate using molecular and cellular methods. The center will
provide the intellectual foundations and materials for
engineering new and powerful cell-based devices, and for training
students in the foundations of mechanobiology.
The center will bring together leading researchers from a diverse
group of disciplines and institutions at the intersection of
biology, mechanics and engineering. This STC will partner the
University of Pennsylvania with Washington University in St.
Louis; the University of Maryland; the New Jersey Institute of
Technology; Bryn Mawr College; Alabama
State University; and Boston University.
As
discoveries in science and technology proliferate at the
nanometer and atomic scales, real-time functional imaging, which
gives researchers the ability to detect what's
happening at those tiny scales, becomes increasingly important.
This center aims to advance real-time functional imaging by
moving away from the current approach of using microscopes that
employ a single imaging method -- optical, X-ray, nano-probe or electron microscopy, for
example -- by combining and improving those techniques.
Ultimately, the center seeks to enhance the research community's
understanding of the structure and functionality of various types
of matter as they change over time. This STC will partner the University of Colorado at Boulder
with Fort Lewis College; Florida International University; the
University of California, Berkeley; the University of California,
Irvine and the University of California, Los Angeles.
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ORI
Seminar Series: The Common Rule Revision
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UCR’s
Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is proud to present the first
talk in the 2017-18 Seminar Series. The ORI Seminar Series focus on
ethical dilemmas and hot topics in human subjects
research.
November
seminar, entitled “The Common Rule Revisions: Implications for
Social Sciences, Humanities and Biomedical Research”, will be
led by Dario Kuzmanović, Assistant Vice
Chancellor, Office for Research Integrity. The talk will take
place on November 2 at 1:00 pm in HUB 367.
Summary: Scientists and universities have long
complained about the conflicting and burdensome patchwork of
regulations governing research in the US. In the past 2 years,
there have been major federal initiates to change that governing
landscape and improve efficiencies. The 2017 Common Rule
revisions are the most comprehensive changes to the human subjects protections in the last 30
years. If accepted, these changes will have an effect on all
those who do research with humans. The proposed changes are expected to affect everything from oral
histories to tissue research. This talk will also discuss
how another piece of regulations (21st Century Cures Act)
promises to have an ever more profound impact on all types of
research done in universities.
This
seminar is free and open to the public. No registration is
required but seating is limited. Light refreshments will be provided.
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Reminder:
Research Lunches
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You can
still RSVP for the upcoming Research and Economic Development
Research Lunches
Numerical
Simulation Research Lunch, November 13 starting at noon in UOB
145
Autism
Research Lunch, November 20 starting at noon in UOB 210
The
lunches are catered by a local Thai
restaurant and include vegetarian and gluten-free options.
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Center for
Advanced Neuroimaging User Meeting - December 1, 2017
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The Center for
Advanced Neuroimaging (CAN) will host a user meeting on Friday
December 1st from 3-5:30 PM. The open house will consist of
presentations covering updates from the center and testimonies of
current users, and an informal reception. The presentations will be held in the Goldman Library (PSYCH 3210)
from 3-4:30. The reception will be held in
the fMRI building and center staff will be on hand to give tours
and answer questions.
Gentle
reminder: pilot scanning hours are available to UCR researchers for
the initial testing of experimental ideas and for collecting
preliminary data for grant applications. For details, please visit CAN.UCR.edu or see attached documents.
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Here's a photo of a baby flamingo. I usually don't include pictures of the zoo birds, but it's
cute. This is from Safari West, in Santa Rosa, which fortunately was not severely impacted by the fires.
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