Did you ask a question during our last webinar but didn’t receive an answer due to time? Dr. David Stone, Associate Vice President for Research at Northern Illinois University, answers more of your questions from his discussion, How to Better Position Yourself as a Scholar, Researcher, and Grant Writer!
Q: What situations or characteristics reinforce teaching-research integration?
A: There are a number of ways that work you do to support teaching can support research and that you do to support research that can be used to support teaching. Literature reviews and bibliographies, for example, can be useful in both. More broadly, being able to link the subject matter of your teaching to your research interests will create overlap. Involving student in data collection, experiments, and/or analysis are also ways of integrating your research and teaching activities.
Q: I am looking to my next phase of career. This sounds like a very intimidating place to venture. What would you recommend as a first step to entry?
A: Staking out a research agenda. This exercise begins with identifying a significant research question that you think is important and that you are willing to spend a great deal of time on. You have to have passion for this question. This is a very intimidating place to venture, and if you are not passionate about your question you won’t put in the time (which often turns out to be nights and weekends) trying to answer it. If you don’t have such a question, or lack the requisite motivation to answer it, I don’t advise venturing into that territory.
Q: For people in the field of education, there are not any early career awards available helping them build up their research. Do you suggest that young researchers in the field of education not to touch DoE or NSF grants? We were told that DoE and NSF often times encourage junior researchers to apply and they want to help and support junior researchers. Is this true? If so and if a junior researcher wants to try, any suggestions on structuring the proposal so that the reviewers know this is the type of junior researcher they want to help grow?
A: The first issue here is to become as well positioned as you can before applying on your own. Become key personnel on someone else’s NSF or DoE grant first. Get to know the system, get to know the program officer and the review process, figure out whether your research interests align with theirs. Then when you do apply on your own, put some senior people on the project with you and/or propose to include an advisory board of senior faculty as a resource for your project. Make sure that some senior faculty with research and/or reviewer experience read your proposal before you submit it – and take their advice!
Q: You mentioned that it’s not effective to provide faculty incentives to write proposals. What have you found to be the most effective in stimulating grant writing activities aside from the external model PIs that you mentioned?
A: I don’t think there is a shortcut to developing a research active culture on a campus. You need to show people possibilities that might appeal to them. One way to do this, as I said, is to invite in successful scholars to talk about what they’ve done, how they’ve done it, and how they’ve benefited personally and professionally from it. You can also highlight those members of your faculty who have succeeded, recognize them for their accomplishments. But then you also need to make the processes of applying for and managing grants as faculty-supportive as possible. This means having sufficient administrative infrastructure to provide real, meaningful assistance to faculty, so that the faculty can focus as much as possible on the science/scholarship and as little as possible on the administrative details of proposals and projects.
Q: As a young researcher how do you decide where to direct your research agenda and what to make your research question when you have multiple areas of interest.
A: The only way to do this is to figure out which one really gets you out of bed in the morning. Remember, this choice will affect the rest of your career and will take years to make any progress on. So don’t make this decision based on what’s currently hot or fundable, because tomorrow it may not be and you’ll still have to roll out of bed early to do it.
Q: What resources are available for environmental artists?
A: Start with the national endowment for the arts, see if they are funding the kind of work you are interested in. Then to a grant search on the foundation directory online and see how has funded environmental artists in the past.
Q: For faculty at small institutions that do not offer internal funding for research, how do you suggest a researcher fund their early research to get enough data to go after federal funding?
A: Your best bet might be to partner with someone at a larger institution on federally funded grants and eventually carve a niche out for yourself from that work. Working on those grants should provide you access to some data and allow you to publish and give talks, all of which may eventually strengthen your positioning sufficiently to be able to apply successfully on your own.
Q: What options are there for a faculty member who has been at a university where teaching has been the main focus–and where faculty of color “always” get assigned service? What do you tell someone who is in late 50s, female of color, about whether they can play this “game?”
A: Yes, you can play the game, but you have to figure out what it is that you bring to the game. In your question, you reference at least two characteristics that successful researchers at research-focused institutions would be interested in. So to get in the game, partnering with a successful group at a research intensive institution would probably be your best bet. But you’ll want to bring more than that. You need to figure out what strengths from your years of teaching and service that you would bring to someone else’s team. What aspects of your positioning are strong and what aspects of their team’s positioning would be strengthened by your participation?
Q: Thanks for your talk. Any tips for positioning PI(s) for NIH T32 Training Grants?
A: Try to read successful proposals from other T32 holders. The two keys are selecting appropriate students and creating high quality training plans. The best way to understand what these look like is to look at others.
Q: Do you think universities should hire grant writers to help faculty, and what percentage of universities hire grant writers?
A: Professional grant writers can be very useful in some circumstances, but those circumstances are limited. Large project grants where the emphasis is on how all the various parts will fit together often benefit from having a writing who can effectively stitch these elements together (though the science is still better written by the scientists). And in some cases universities do hire grant writers (usually PhDs) in specific high output areas who can work directly with the scientists to write proposals. Large universities sometimes do this, but I wouldn’t call it common.
Managing a proposal development project can be difficult. They can involve multiple collaborators (both inside and outside your institution) with each person doing a number of different tasks. Utilizing the Timeline section of an In4Grants project can help you organize this process so you can deliver a winning proposal.
Has an In4Grants user shared a grant opportunity with you but you’re not quite sure how to reply to the email? Well the notification that you receive provides multiple ways for you to reply and give feedback.
