News for All Faculty and Research Staff      Sept. 8, 2014

Welcome Back from Senior Vice President Molloy

Dear Colleagues: Here's hoping the new semester is off to a good start for you. We've made considerable progress recently to move the Office of Research and Economic Development forward toward more effectively and efficiently meeting the needs of our faculty and research staff on all three campuses. I'll highlight just a few developments.

• To build an efficient, paperless and user-friendly system for grant and contract submissions, we've begun building a Research Administration and Proposal Submission System. The project team has hired Huron Consulting to install its "best-in-class" software. You can read more here.
• Rutgers' first director of corporate engagement is Cherise Kent, who has moved from technology transfer compliance in our Office of Technology Commercialization. Her background includes many successful years in the pharmaceutical industry and at the University of Pennsylvania. She will implement systems to support a centralized Corporate Engagement program, as well as coordinate and track progress in corporate engagement activities.
• Vince Smeraglia has moved from OTC to the Office of Translational Science, where he now serves as executive director of strategic alliances. His responsibilities include marketing, promoting and establishing biomedical research collaborations and contracts with the private sector (in collaboration with Corporate Engagement), foundations and outside academic institutions, as well as providing strategic advice on patenting and legal issues.
• Margaret Brennan-Tonetta is associate vice president for economic development, in addition to her role with the N.J. Agricultural Experimental Station. Her responsibilities include providing strategic direction to broad-based university economic development initiatives such as RDI2 and initiating a universitywide metrics program and measuring the economic impact of the university on the state and national economy.

Though the past year, post-integration, has been challenging, our new organization has begun to work together as a coordinated team to help deliver critical services that support research, innovation and economic development for the "new" Rutgers, New Jersey's flagship state university. Our team in the expanded Office of Research and Economic Development has worked hard to get off to a positive start. There is, of course, much work still to be done, but I'm confident that each unit in ORED is moving in the right direction. We certainly welcome your comments, questions and suggestions. I wish you the best during the 2014-2015 academic year.

Sincerely, Christopher J. Molloy

Senior Vice President, Research and Economic Development

The Research Administrators Information Network (RAIN) will meet for the first time Sept. 29 in Newark and Oct. 6 on Busch Campus. Sponsored by the Division of Grants and Contracts Administration and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, RAIN had been dormant during the integration. The guest speaker will be Terri Goss Kinzy, associate vice president for research administration, who will discuss Reflections a Year Post-Merger and Into the Looking Glass Moving Forward. Location and other details will be provided in our Sept. 18 newsletter. 

This seminar is intended to provide participants with an overview of the SBIR and STTR programs with a focus on the NIH and its two largest  institutes, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The program will include instruction on topic searching and an introduction to proposal writing, followed by a networking lunch and one-on-one scheduled conversations with NCI and NIAID representatives. Read more here.

All Rutgers faculty, staff and students are invited to participate in the Nicholson Foundation & Rutgers Healthcare Delivery Innovation Idea-thon, a competition to improve health outcomes of vulnerable populations and reduce health care costs. In phase one, to be held Oct. 13 and 27, three teams will win a total of $15,000 in prizes and additional perks. The second phase is a Challenge and the winning team receives $50,000 to participate in the final phase, a pilot test in a clinical or community setting. Read more here.

The New York Metropolitan Chapter of ACRP presents the Sixth Annual Clinical Research Symposium on "Study Optimization: Strategies to Enhance Recruitment, Monitoring and Trial Performance," Sept. 26, 8:15 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Read more here.

Alexander Gates, professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Rutgers-Newark, is the principal investigator of an award totaling $3.5 million (rewrite this line and the next two). The project titled Phase II: Garden State LSAMP is being supported by the National Science Foundation. Learn more about Prof. Gates here. Each week ORED provides a short list of some of the many grants to Rutgers researchers for the Faculty & Staff Bulletin. The archive is here.

Whether you're a senior faculty member, a recent Ph.D., a grad student or a research staffer, the search for sponsor information is the first step toward external funding success. All Rutgers faculty, staff and students have free subscriptions to COS-PIVOT, a powerful search engine for finding funding opportunities and scholar profiles from within all of Rutgers and outside of the university. Also, be sure to join our public SAKAI site, Funding Sources - ORED Resources, for links to open searches for most federal funding agencies.

Key Contacts for Research Support

A list of key contacts has been posted here, including staff with ORED and elsewhere at Rutgers. Send suggestions to [email protected].

You Can Contribute Content and Email Addresses

We invite you to submit news or events that are related to research for this newsletter, which goes to all Rutgers faculty and our list of 530+ research staff. We continue to expand the list, so please send email addresses of any Rutgers staff who should get our newsletter to [email protected].