NSF CAREER Grants at UMass Amherst, 2007-2012

Here is an approximate "scorecard" for UMass Amherst CAREERs.  For other Early Career awards, click here. 
To give you the punchline in advance, the lesson from this page is

APPLY! (you can't get it if you don't apply).

* stimulus year
From FY 2007- 2012, the rate of successful applications is 29% (as in the table). Given multiple applications, 33 of 76 applicants (43%) have gotten the award.  17 were successful on first application, 10 on second, 6 on third. Only 5 people applied 3 times (the limit) and were unsuccessful 3 times.  So apply, and then apply again.
(Lower funding rates post-stimulus stem from fewer awards and more applications, which represents a nation-wide trend.) 

2013 projection: 20 applications, 7 for the first time, 10 for the second time, and 3 for the third time.  

2012 breakdown:
22 applied this year, 12 for the first time, 7 for the second time and 3 for the third time.
Awardees by attempts: 1 on first application (1/12 = 8%), 3 on second application (43%), and 1 (33%) on third application.  Success rate, percentage-wise, was better on subsequent tries.  Three awards went to women (of 7 applying); one award to a man( of 15 applying.)

BY Department

Here is a tally by department (2007 to 2012). One department stands out (although it hasn't gotten any in the last 2 years).  You might check with your Program Officer whether the stats for Careers from your division are more or less favorable than from other units or other funding mechanisms. I attach some NSF statistics for you to peruse.  I do not at present have a way to find which directorate someone applied to (unless they are successful), so I can't attach appropriate comparisons by field. You can download 2011 funding rates taken from the NSF website here (pdf). (Warning: People tend to take NSF "funding rates" with a grain of salt, but we seem to do slightly better than the average.) (not updated yet for 2013)

By PI:
Here is an alphabetical list for the 33 CAREER Awardees since 2007, followed by the names of now-senior faculty who received the award.

Previous awardees (before 2007):  Adler, Micah; Auerbach, Scott; Bhatia, Surita; Brainerd, Elizabeth; Coughlin, Edward Bryan; Dasgupta, Nilanjana; Emrick, Todd; Ganesan, Deepak; Gao, Robert; Goeckel, Dennis; Learned-Miller, Erik; Levine, Brian; Menon, Narayanan; Metz, Ricardo; Miklau, Gerome;  Muriel, Ana; Normark, Ben; Podos, Jeffrey; Polizzi, Eric; Qiu, Yin-Long; Reising, Steven; Roberts, Susan; Rotello, Vincent; Rothstein, Jonathan; Schweik, Charles; Shenoy, Prashant; Sitaraman, Ramesh; Sottile, Frank; Tew, Gregory; Thayumanavan, Sankaran; Venkataraman, Dhandapani; Watkins, James; Wolf, Tilman; Zheng, Zhi (Alex) Q.

PECASE (Presidental Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers). This award recognizes the top 100 CAREER awardees: Bezanilla, Magdalena; Hayward, Ryan; Tew, Greg; Ford, David (before UMass); and Brown, Casey (while at Columbia). Briseño, Alex received the PECASE honor for his Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research.

This information came from a Jordan On-Line report, and is subject to errors in my data manipulation.  Please contact Bpearson@research.umass.edu with additions or corrections.

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