Initiative seeks to bolster faculty grant writing

‌

Ryne Raffaelle

The Office of the Vice President for Research is providing resources for faculty to address reviewer comments on unfunded proposals and improve them for resubmission.

The Proposal Revision Fund enhances opportunities for faculty members seeking external funding and further promotes the growth of research. The program, launched this academic year, awards up to $10,000 to selected faculty members for collecting additional pilot data, traveling to conferences and conducting further activities to increase the chances that a resubmission will be funded.

“Statistically, the probability of funding increases dramatically with revision and resubmission to almost every sponsoring organization,” says Ryne Raffaelle, RIT vice president for research and associate provost. “This program is designed to reward those who have already put in the hard work of pulling an initial proposal together and encourages them to stick with it, so they eventually will see the fruits of their labor ­— the answers to those research questions that intrigued them in the first place.”

The 2012 recipients of the Proposal Revision Fund, listed below, are faculty members who submitted proposals to an external funding source within the last year that received positive reviews, but weren’t funded. The recipients were also selected based on how the investigators plan to address the proposal’s shortcomings and the probability of success upon resubmission.

The faculty members and the titles of their proposals are:

• Caroline Easton (Institute for Health Sciences and Technology), “A Virtual Reality Tool for Use in Education and Treatment of Alcohol Dependence and Aggression Across Education and Clinical Settings”
• Grover Swartzlander (College of Science), “Lift and Torque on Optical Wings”
• Steven Day (Kate Gleason College of Engineering), “Investigation of Magnetically Levitated Blood Pump”
• William Middleton (College of Liberal Arts), “Development of Laboratory Infrastructure for Research and Teaching in Archaeometry”
• Esa Rantanen (College of Liberal Arts), “The Effect of Target Trajectory Uncertainty and Task Interruptions on Situational Awareness”
• Michael Savka (College of Science), “Plant Labs: An Inquiry-Based Learning Delivery Module of the Plant Biotechnology Concentration at RIT”
• Ferat Sahin (Kate Gleason College of Engineering), “Unobtrusive Geriatric Health Monitoring and Assistance”

“Establishing new sponsored research programs is more of a campaign rather than a single battle,” Raffaelle adds. “Revising and resubmitting unsuccessful proposals is a big part of the process.”