Description:

Successful proposals shine brighter than the competition by illuminating innovation, spotlighting strengths, and kindling sponsor confidence in the investigators' capacity to carry out the work. Enter the "pitch." Skillfully framing and presenting your research helps you come out on top in a hyper-competitive funding environment. This webinar by the Office of Research Development and the College of Natural Sciences will outline the elements -- the what? why? and how? -- of an effective pitch and provide practical approaches you can use to develop your pitch into a strong concept paper.

Presenters:

• Loren Walker, Director, Office of Research Development
• Michael Wright, Director, CNS Office of Research Development

Register below. A Zoom link will be on the confirmation page and emailed to you.

The Office of Research Development (ORD) will present information about how to apply to the following four campus-wide internal funding programs. The session will also include an introduction to the new InfoReady web-based submission system. Please register below.

Follow links for information about each program:

• Faculty Research Grant / Healey Endowment Grant (FRG/HEG) – Awards of up to $20,000 to support faculty research, scholarly, and creative activities in all disciplines and fields. Deadline: October 30, 2023.
• Armstrong Fund for Science – One award of up to $40,000 to a faculty member or team in any Science or Engineering discipline for high-risk, high-reward research with potential for leading to external funding. Preproposal deadline: November 13, 2023. Full proposal (by invitation) deadline: February 12, 2024
• Subvention Program – Awards assist faculty with the cost of producing books and scholarly publications, and creative work in the visual and performing arts. Faculty having tenure-track, tenured, or emeritus/a status are eligible. Deadline: January 30, 2024.
• Public Service Endowment Grants – Awards of up to $15,000 to support special projects and related scholarship that will address a community-identified problem, need, or opportunity. Faculty and professional staff in all disciplines and fields are eligible. Deadline: February 19, 2024.

Contact ord@umass.edu with questions.

Workshopping your CAREER Proposal: NOTE!  Rescheduled - see new dates and times.

Part I. Writing the Introduction, Overview, and Intellectual Merit sections and creating an outline for your CAREER proposal. May 20, 2020, 1:00 - 2:30 pm, via Zoom. Rescheduled for May 29, 2020, 10:00 - 11:30am, via Zoom - - Registration Closed

Part II. Writing the Education Plan and Broader Impacts sections of your CAREER proposal. June 17, 2020, 1:00 - 2:30 pm, via Zoom. Please register by June 5, 2020. Rescheduled for June 26, 2020, 10:00 - 11:30am, via Zoom. Registration closes June 12.

We are offering two sessions of Workshopping your CAREER Proposal as small-group, virtual events. To allow time for participants to focus on different parts of their 15-page proposal narratives, we will schedule the sessions four weeks apart, May 29 and again on June 26. Each session will last 90 minutes.

In Part I, we will focus on writing and critiquing key components of the proposal: The Introduction, Overview, and Intellectual Merit, which together usually comprise the first one to two pages of the project narrative. We will also discuss how to build out participants’ proposal outlines into clear, well-organized proposals. In Part II, we will focus on the Education Plan and Broader Impacts sections of the narrative.

Participants will share their drafts with each other a week before each workshop and be prepared to provide feedback to each other during the workshop, according to a rubric we will provide. You will come away with an improved plan for writing and refining your proposal. We will follow the guidance presented in the online course, How to Write a Successful NSF CAREER Proposal, by Lucy Deckard, Academic Research Funding Strategies, LLC. Participants will need to register for the course in order to watch the relevant videos and download materials, including a proposal outline template and sample proposals. Interested participants will be invited to form their own proposal writing cohorts aimed at the July 27, 2020 NSF due date.

Register here  for the workshops and the webinar. When you register, you will be asked to confirm that you are willing to share sections of your proposal draft with the other participants. We will follow up with workshop agendas and materials. This page also holds other resources to help you with developing your CAREER proposal.

Please feel free to contact Mary K. Green (mkgreen@umass.edu) and Mary Fechner (mfechner@research.umass.edu) for more information.

As of this time, NSF has not extended the July 27 deadline for submission, so we hope you will be able to able to take advantage of these workshops despite the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Also visit our NSF CAREER Award proposal development resources page for other resources to help you develop your CAREER proposal.

Learn more about the FRG/HEG program and how to prepare a competitive proposal. Please register.

The FRG/HEG program encourages proposals for projects involving research, scholarship, and creative works in all disciplines from: Junior faculty members initiating new projects; mid-career faculty members in pursuit of new directions; and mid-career faculty members seeking to re-vitalize an ongoing program after a gap in productivity. All full-time faculty are eligible. New deadline - October 25, 2019. Awards have been increased to $20,000 and the competition will be held just once a year in the fall semester; there will be no spring competition. Visit the FRG/HEG webpage for guidelines and application materials.