or select your discipline:
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What’s in a name?
Plenty, if it comes to your audience being able to find your office and understand its mission.
For this reason, the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs in 102 Fairchild Hall, a unit of the Office of the Vice President for Research, is changing its name effective with the fall 2018 semester, to the
Office of Research Development
.
The old name is overly broad and doesn’t describe what we do. It suggests the entire OVPR operation, and it creates confusion with the university’s post-award fiscal administration unit, the Sponsored Programs Accounting Office. (SPA is an entirely different entity that is under the VP for Administration and Finance.)
What is done by the team in 102 Fairchild is more properly described as
research development
; that is, we work with faculty members to help develop their research ideas, identify appropriate funding opportunities, find collaborators, and craft their proposals.
Development Directors Joel Anderson, Mary Lou Marino, and I all work with individual faculty members and groups, as well as conduct training and familiarization sessions about specific funding sources and opportunities, facilitate the early career faculty trip to Washington, D.C. funding agencies, and coordinate with associate deans for research in the colleges on research-related topics. We work with the Graduate School and K-State Postdoctoral Association on events for graduate students and postdocs.
In addition, ORD will continue to conduct the internal small grants programs, Faculty Development Awards and University Small Research Grants, and manage the limited submissions process for opportunities for which the university is restricted to a certain number of applications. Our annotated listing of requests for proposals,
The Funding Connection
, appears each Wednesday in the
Research Weekly
newsletter.
Finally, our office manages the university subscription to Pivot, a customizable research profile tool that can be used to create personalized funding searches and an external facing web page with your research interests and capabilities, viewable through our new Pivot Gallery
subscription.
ORSP’s name is changing, but our services remain the same
, and we will continue to coordinate with other OVPR units including PreAward Services (proposal submission and contract negotiation), University Research Compliance Office (coordination of compliance training and approvals), and the Kansas State University Research Foundation/Institute for Commercialization (IP, patenting, licensing, and corporate relations).
— Beth Montelone, senior associate vice president for research
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- Join us to celebrate the retirement of Rich Doan, grants and contracts administrator in PreAward Services, August 22 from 3:00 to 4:30 in Union 209. Rich has served K-State since 2000, and his retirement is effective August 25. Congratulations, Rich!
- Mark your calendar for upcoming training events from the Office of Research Development, formerly known as the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (see above!).
- An information session on internal grant programs is slated for September 5, 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Union 207. Hear about the submission and review process for Faculty Development Award and University Small Research Grant programs.
- Hear about Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, opportunities September 13, 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Union 206. This session will give a general overview of the agency and its six technical offices, provide information about the Young Faculty Award, provide examples of current solicitations, and more. Please register.
- Attend a BioKansas Women in Science lunch, panel discussion, and networking session October 9 at the K-State Alumni Center from 11:30 to 1:30. Space is limited. Find more information and register.
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Agency news and trending topics
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When used to display maps and other data, the rainbow color scheme can confuse viewers, especially those who are colorblind. To combat this problem, scientists
created a new yellow and blue scale called civdis
to be both appealing and accurate,
Scientific American
reports. In a study in
PLOS ONE
, researchers created civdis in a warm and cool color combination visible for those with red-green color blindness,
making figures more pleasing to the eye
than the most accessible color gradient, gray-scale.
Whether an experiment or experience, the Stanford Prison Experiment has been caught squarely in the midst of a whirlwind of self-reckoning in the field of social psychology.
The National Institutes of Health Office of Extramural Research blog contains posts on a variety of topics. Recent posts include “A Look at the Human Subjects System,” Trends in Diversity within the NIH-funded Workforce,” and “NIH Application Resubmission Policy.” Readers can subscribe to the blog to receive email notifications of new posts.
Despite promising advances, important scientific questions remain unanswered in the effort to develop a safe and effective Ebola vaccine, according to members of an international Ebola research consortium. In a Viewpoint published in
The Lancet
, the experts review the current field of Ebola vaccine candidates and clinical trials and highlight key gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed by future research.
The long wait for a White House science adviser is over. President Donald Trump announced today that he intends to nominate
meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier
, a university administrator and former vice-chair of the governing board of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The OSTP director traditionally, but not always, also holds the title of the president’s science adviser. The move caps a search process of record-setting length—nearly 560 days,
double the longest time taken by any other modern president to name an OSTP director
. Many in the research community had lamented the delay. But the wait may have been worth it: Droegemeier, a respected veteran of the Washington, D.C., policymaking scene, is getting positive reviews from science and university groups.
American Academy of Arts & Sciences case studies explore views on controversial issues: vaccine safety, genetically modified foods, and climate change.
If you flip open a biology textbook or do a quick search on Google, you'll quickly learn that there are a few hundred types of cells in the human body. "And it's true, because in broad categories, a few hundred is a good characterization," says Aviv Regev, a core member of the Broad Institute, a genetics research center in Cambridge, Mass. But look a little closer, as Regev has been doing, and a far more complicated picture emerges. "No one really knows how many there will be," she says. Immunologists had already counted more than 300 in the immune system alone. The eye's retina, other research showed, has more than 100. How many in the whole body? … For the last two years Regev, a professor of biology at MIT, has been co-leading a massive international effort to get that answer. Called the
Human Cell Atlas Consortium
, the effort aims to account for and better understand every cell type and sub-type, and how they interact.
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k-state.edu/research
785.532.5110
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