RASP Fall 2021 Faculty Newsletter

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back to a very special Fall semester. It is amazing to see the faces of faculty, staff and students in person versus being on a computer screen. I also acknowledge that not everyone is comfortable with returning to campus given the current state of the virus and I ask you all to follow the Flashes Safe 8 and take care of each other. As promised during the RASP townhall in May, I wanted to provide you with an update on what we have been doing over the summer to continue our forward momentum in facilitating faculty research. During that townhall, I noted three key priorities: 1) Supporting research and scholarship in the post-pandemic world; 2) Collaborating with university leadership to ensure financial sustainability of RASP programming and Institutes; and 3) Addressing misaligned policies/procedures that serve as a barrier to the research enterprise. I also mentioned plans to form a faculty research advisory committee and to establish a RASP fellowship to support a faculty member in the Arts or Humanities who will aid RASP in better serving the needs of faculty in these disciplines.

Over the summer we made considerable headway in addressing these priorities as well as others raised by you during the townhall. Please take a look below to see what we have been able to accomplish.

Supporting research and scholarship in the post-pandemic world

Maintaining our primary aim of constantly weighing a return to “normal” research/creative activity while keeping everyone safe, this summer we were able to fully return to labs/studios. Although changes in mask guidance necessitated flexibility, wearing a mask indoors allows researchers to engage in research/creative activity without additional mitigation factors. We will continue to monitor public health guidance and will keep the research community apprised of any changes to current procedures.

Collaborating with university leadership to ensure financial sustainability of RASP programming and Institutes

For the past five years, the Institutes and the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program were funded out of strategic roadmap funding that is no longer available. Institute directors and the Office of Student Research have consistently noted a lack of sustainable funding as a major concern each year. Over the summer, we worked closely with the Division of Finance and Administration and President Diacon to secure base budget funding for the institutes and the SURE program. Pending Board of Trustee approval, this funding will ensure that these critical programs have continued support and are better able to engage in long-term strategic planning.

Image by Megan Rexazin from Pixabay

RASP Faculty Fellow

Yuko Kurahashi was selected as a RASP faculty fellow for 2021-11. Yuko will help us in determining how RASP can better address the needs of our Arts and Humanities faculty

HCRI is Now an Institute

At the June 2021 Board of Trustees meeting, the Healthy Communities Research Institute was approved. 

There have been both a decrease in the number of decentralized research support positions and a decrease in the number of sponsored programs staff in RASP. This presents challenges that simply surpass our ability to provide the same level of service that we have in the past with fewer people. However, our focus on clear and transparent expectations for faculty will hopefully ensure that, for those following recommended timelines, there will be no noticeable change in the levels of service provided by the Division. That is, we are continuing to emphasize that:

1. Sponsored programs should be notified of intention to submit a proposal at least ten working days before the submission deadline.
2. A complete proposal record with the final budget must be entered into Kuali and routed for internal approval no later than five working days prior to the due date.
3. Near final drafts of all documents should be provided two days before the deadline (this is to ensure that PIs have completed all components of the proposal and that office of sponsored programs personnel know the correct number of attachment placeholders necessary for submission). Final documents are due by 8AM on the agency due date.

Faculty following these recommended deadlines will be prioritized on any deadline and will see no change in levels of service provided by the Division. We are unable to make the same promise to faculty not following these deadlines and may be forced to inform individuals not following these deadlines that we are unable to submit their proposals. It should be mentioned that these are extremely generous deadlines and in order to prepare a quality competitive proposal it is necessary to work far ahead of these deadlines, so the good news is that following these will result in a better proposal with a higher chance of being funded.

Given budget challenges and a number of staff participating in the voluntary separation plan we have had some large-scale restructuring and condensing. Mark van ‘t Hooft is our new Assistant Director of Sponsored Programs and the first point of contact for faculty interested in submitting a grant proposal. Al Green has joined RASP as Director of Technology Commercialization, allowing us to benefit from his extensive network in the innovation ecosystem in NEO and beyond. Al will be providing support for entrepreneurs interested in technology transfer. We have eliminated the Office of Research Marketing and Communications and are partnering with the School of Media and Journalism to provide our research communications. Stories are researched and written by a journalism student and edited by the School of Media and Journalism and RASP.

Faculty have also been busy over the summer. Here are just a few examples of recent grant success: 

• Shannon Navy and Lisa Borgerding received $1,000,000 from NSF for Resources Accessed to Cultivate and Enhance Resilience (RACER).
• Lique Coolen received $760,000 from the Army for Dopamine D3 Agonists: Developing Treatments for Sexual Dysfunction in Chronic Spinal Cord-Injured Male Rats.
• Torsten Hegmann and Elda Hegmann received $550,000 from NSF for PFI-RP: A Development of zero-power optical sensor platform for the detection of toxic gases.
• Oleg Lavrentovich and Sergij Shiyanovskii received $438,605 from NSF for Electro-optical phase retarders based on newly discovered nematics.
• Thorsten-Lars Schmidt received $368,816 from NIH for Small and Mechanosensitive Membrane Proteins Studied with DNA-based Tools. Four additional future years of funding are anticipated with for a total award of $1,864,034.

Please join me in congratulating our colleagues!!