Research And Special Programs, Associate Vice President
Goal
Increase Research Activities
Increase research activities on campus for all areas
Objective
Provide More Research Funding Information
Inform new and senior faculty of research opportunities
KPI
Distribute Funding Information To All Depts And Colleges
ORSP distributes funding opportunities alerts to interested departments and colleges
Result
Distribution Of Funding Information
Last year we provided funding opportunities to all colleges and 23 of the 29 Departments on campus. The alerts we provided were in the form of requests for proposals and program announcements.
Action
Ways To Disseminate Funding Opportunities
By providing more research funding information we feel that we can increase research activities at SHSU. While we realize that not all academic areas commonly have funding opportunities, we will work towards providing opportunities to an increased number of Departments. We will attempt to find opportunities for at least two of the Departments we did not service this year. In the past, we have worked with a reasonable expectation of distributing at least 15 funding opportunities per month to researchers and Departments on campus. Some of this distribution effort has always been to have staff at the Research Office match requests for proposals (RFP) from funding sources with faculty interests. Additionally, we subscribe to a database that allows our researchers to search for opportunities themselves, to discover interests that only they know might be able to identify. This year to address this objective, we identified the following actions:
Have ORSP staff match funding opportunities with researchers and forward those results with the goal of increasing the number of Departments we serve. We will designate two staff members to have this as part of their job description and other staff will also assist in the effort.
Update our database for use by researchers to search for funding opportunities. This may help in increasing our coverage of serving Departments. We plan to do this by upgrading from the previously used Community of Scholars Funding Opportunities (COS) to COS/PIVOT, an enhanced database for searching for funding opportunities. We will designate an ORSP staff member to oversee the database and train faculty and staff who want to use the database.
Include an available database for searching for funding opportunities from Foundations to better serve scholars in the Fine Arts and Humanities. Our currently unserved Departments are in these two academic areas. ORSP staffing will be similar to the previous item.
Enroll more faculty as users of the databases to find funding opportunities, especially in underserved Departments.
Hold workshops to discuss funding opportunities and ways to find them. We will hold at least one of these workshops in areas represented by our underserved Departments.
Goal
Increase External Funding
Increase sponsored research for all areas
Objective
Increase Number Of Faculty Pursuing Sponsored Research
Increase number of Faculty submitting grants to NSF, NIH, Dept. of Education, and other agencies
KPI
Conduct Grantwriting Workshops
Provide assistance to faculty through topic specific grantwriting workshops. We will offer at least six workshops this year.
Result
Grantwriting Workshops
We held three workshops during fall semester and three during spring semester.
Action
Grant Writing Workshops
ORSP offers grant writing workshops in an attempt to increase the number and amount of external funding. After reflecting on our previous grant workshops and results of those workshops, we have chosen what we think are the topics most needed by our research community. We again are offering three workshops each semester, with the following workshops offered this year:
Basics of Grant Writing
Budgeting and the Post Award Process
National Science Foundation Grants
National Institutes of Health Grants
Department of Education Grants
Writing Grants to Foundations
Goal
Increase Scholarly Activities
Increase creative and scholarly achievements
Objective
Assist Faculty To Develop More Scholarly Activities
Support faculty with scholarly endeavors
KPI
Assist Faculty Achieve More Scholarly Activities
ORSP will sponsor at least six faculty to travel or conduct activities related to scholarly achievement.
Action
Support Of Scholarly Activities
In past years, in an effort to increase scholarly activities we have primarily assisted researchers with travel to granting agencies, conferences, or workshops. While our resources are very limited, we choose the recipients of our support by ranking those highest where we think these funds can make the most impact in increasing scholarly activities. Due to funding levels, we were only able to support five faculty instead of the intended six. However, we felt that we stragegically used our funds.
This year we will strategically use our funds to attempt to support at least six faculty to aid their scholarly activities. However, we will again prioritize this funding to provide resources were we think our funding will provide the most impact in bringing high quality research to SHSU.