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From the desk of the VPR: Global Food Systems
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As a land-grant university, Kansas State was built upon the foundations of access to higher education and research in the agricultural sciences and the mechanical and liberal arts that improves the economic prosperity of Kansas families.
As an internationally renowned university, our impact is now global – our alumni work and live all over the world, and the world turns to our faculty and students to solve critical challenges and fill knowledge gaps. Our strengths and talents are numerous and diverse.
Historically, K-State has contributed to improvements in the largest industry in the state: the first patents and licenses generated in the 1940s focused on food safety and improved food production. A network of extension offices across Kansas has facilitated knowledge transfer to producers for over a century through a system of cooperation that is the envy of the world — the Cooperative Extension service created by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. Whether you like to think of our heritage as “farm-to-fork,” “test plots-to-the-table,” or “classroom-to-the-kitchen,”
food is a large part of what we have always done exceptionally well at K-State.
Our external stakeholders continue to resonate with this strength, as we discovered last year during the listening sessions that led to our
Innovation and Economic Prosperity (IEP) designation
with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.
Working with faculty, staff, and stakeholders, and leveraging our IEP designation, our office has been coordinating and supporting the Global Food Systems campus-wide initiatives.
K-State researchers have been engaged in new discoveries in food diversity, animal and human nutrition and health, production improvements, cost reduction strategies, disease mitigation and prevention, post-harvest loss prevention and food safety, transportation, environmental management, soil improvement and sustainability, and water and other resource management, to list of just a few of our many and diverse areas of impact.
Global Food Systems research, education, and engagement transcend individual academic programs and is highly multidisciplinary. As such, the GFS Kansas Department of Commerce grant has resided in our office since 2016 and been refocused following the allotments of the reductions to higher education.
We have recently been focusing on bringing faculty together to identify opportunities and activities to promote research, technology transfer, and corporate engagement, led by Dr. Maureen Olewnik, who has recently moved into our realigned
Office of Research Development
.
As the growing world population will rely on the production of more safe and sustainable food sources, K-State is leading the way, and
we are making it easier for the world to find out about us and what we do in Global Food Systems research, education, outreach, and training
. I invite you to visit our newly constructed
GFS website
and listen to
“Something to Chew On”
(our podcasts on food research), discover programs and opportunities, and join teams of experts who are helping to chart the course for the 21st century of food-related challenges and solutions. You will also soon find out more about the Global Food Systems Economic Prosperity Accelerator project with the Department of Commerce – Economic Development Agency and our connections to corporate engagement and global food business and entrepreneurship programs.
Buen provecho!
— Peter
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- The government shutdown has ended, but funding agencies will need time to resume normal operations. The National Science Foundation Resumption of Operations web page contains important updates about deadlines that will change, and revised deadlines will be posted by February 1. For other agency-specific questions, please contact PreAward Services at 785-532-6804 or research@k-state.edu.
- The January issue of The POSTDOCket, the National Postdoctoral Association newsletter, is available. Find out about new board members, funding opportunities for international postdoctoral scholars, the NIH Broadening Experiences of Scientific Training (BEST) program, and more. Read the newsletter.
- The revised Common Rule took effect on January 21, 2019. Please visit the URCO website to access updated applications, consent templates, and other information; email comply@ksu.edu with any questions.
- Join Grant Writing 101 for postdocs, graduate students, and early career faculty February 14 from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Union Wildcat Chamber. Co-sponsors include the Office of Research Development, Graduate Student Council, the K-State Postdoctoral Association, the Writing Center, and grant specialists from the College of Agriculture and the College of Veterinary Medicine. Please register.
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As previously reported in Research Weekly, K-State is partnering with
Cayuse LLC
to streamline and increase transparency into our research administration processes.
Cayuse Sponsored Projects
(
Cayuse SP
) carries several advantages. The system:
- allows users to view all proposals and awards associated with a project and provides detailed tracking of both awards and subawards;
- makes it easy to find the many documents that are part of a funded project;
- offers multiple reporting options that will facilitate summarizing sponsored project activities for units such as departments and college;
- includes electronic routing of documents and allows data integration with other institutional systems such as financial and human resource systems; and
- will be compatible with any modernizations of those systems that may be implemented in the near future.
The procurement of Cayuse SP comes after extensive efforts to document the multiple legacy systems used across campus for research administration, which collectively have the net effect of bogging our operations down in unnecessarily redundant and potentially error-generating data entry.
Thus, implementation of Cayuse SP is taking an important step toward a full, comprehensive, electronic research administration system, which will be needed as we make further advances toward elevating our status as a research university.
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Agency news and trending topics
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The agencies that conduct or fund research that have been mostly closed since 22 December 2018 include NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Once their doors are open, however, there will be a staggering amount of work waiting to be done. And that will require triage, says David Conover, vice president of research at the University of Oregon in Eugene and a former ocean division director at NSF. “The first thing they’ll probably want to do is address what didn’t happen during the shutdown,” he says. At NSF, a $7.6 billion agency with no in-house research operations, that will mean processing routine award transactions that were frozen, resuming conversations with scientists with questions about both current awards as well as upcoming competitions, and rescheduling more than 100 review panels—involving 2000 proposals—that were scrubbed during the shutdown.
It’s no secret that effective science communicators are the most successful in the grants sweepstakes. As a result, a range of books, websites, videos, and workshops devoted to improving communication between scientists and the public are being increasingly marketed to the scientific community. One admirable addition to this crowded field is Championing Science: Communicating Your Ideas to Decision Makers. Written by a practicing scientist (Roger Aines) and a scientific communications specialist (Amy Aines), this book offers a practical guide to optimizing all aspects of communications. Its aim is specific: to use proven methods to motivate decision-makers and colleagues to support, fund, and implement work.
An existential threat. That's what scientific societies supported by journal subscriptions call Plan S. Introduced in September 2018 by European research funders and endorsed by others since then, the plan will require that grantees' papers be immediately available free of charge. All publishers that charge subscriptions will be affected, but scientific societies fear they could be hit especially hard. One, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) in Rockville, Maryland, predicts worldwide adoption of Plan S could cut its net revenue from publishing by a third. Less drastic impacts on societies' bottom lines might still force them to sell their journals to commercial publishers and cut back on activities supported by publishing, such as professional training and public outreach.
In a conference call with reporters, the co-chairs of the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
— a major funder of global health programs — said that while eliminating infectious disease epidemics has proven difficult, progress made possible by global aid mechanisms has led to a halving since 1990 of mortality rates of children under the age of 5, as well as of the number of all deaths due to HIV, malaria, and measles. To ensure that that work continues, the couple urged wealthy nations such as the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom to replenish four key funds over the next eighteen months — the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
, the
Global Polio Eradication Initiative
(GPEI), the
Global Financing Facility
for child and maternal health, and
GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance
.
Scientists at the University of California (UC) San Diego and UC Berkeley have developed a new approach to controlling disease-carrying or crop-destroying insects that uses CRISPR-Cas9-based genome editing to determine insect sex and fertility. The new technology, developed initially in fruit flies as a test case, represents a new take on sterile insect techniques (SITs) that have been used since the 1930s to mass produce and release sterile males as a strategy for eradicating insect populations.
Uranus is arguably the most mysterious planet in the solar system – we know very little about it. So far, we have only visited the planet once, with the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986. The most obvious odd thing about this ice giant is the fact that it is spinning on its side. … The ice giant also has a surprisingly cold temperature and a messy and off-centremagnetic field, unlike the neat bar-magnet shape of most other planets like Earth or Jupiter. Scientists therefore suspect that Uranus was once similar to the other planets in the solar system but was suddenly flipped over. So what happened?
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k-state.edu/research
researchweekly@k-state.edu
785.532.5110
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