or select your discipline:
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- The Department of Agriculture Foundational and Applied Science Program supports grants in six USDA priority areas to advance knowledge in both fundamental and applied sciences important to agriculture
- The National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipends Program supports individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. This support allows continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months
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From the Desk of the VPR: A Tune for the Start of Summer
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Just over 60 years ago, Eddie Cochran and his manager Jerry Capehart wrote the rockabilly single entitled “Summertime Blues,” which became a hit. The song was also covered by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Alan Jackson to notable acclaim. The refrain follows a series of misguided attempts at getting out of work by a young teenager:
“Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do
Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”
For K-State faculty, it does feel like there’s no respite from our research. Staying caught up with our discipline seems like a Sisyphean task, and writing up that next paper or book chapter, performing field studies and tests, or developing the next juried exhibit is a labor of love. These work products hopefully lead to the next funding opportunity or speaking invitation, and countless proposal deadlines are looming in the fall semester.
As you have heard in several of our Research Weekly editions this semester, we are working towards implementing proposal management software updates that should streamline the grant proposal process through upgrades in Cayuse. We are also hoping to implement new systems for managing and improving the Institutional Review Board processes for everyone involved.
Consequently, I hope that you won’t be "raising a fuss or raising a holler just to try to raise a dollar" to support your research agenda. We have been engaging several different stakeholder groups to test and improve our systems. Please keep us informed about how well the transition is going.
To keep the funding opportunities coming into your inbox, please check out our
K-State Pivot Gallery
. We have also written about Pivot Gallery in Research Weekly, so if you haven’t already do so, please set up or update your profile so we can get you connected to the latest information about funding.
Lastly, I hope you will take some time to relax this summer. Whether you tack it on to professional meeting travel or just get off campus for a while, I encourage you to "take a few weeks, go and have a fine vacation." Spending some down time for fun or self-reflection can be an effective cure for the summertime blues.
– Peter
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The Office of the Vice President for Research is pleased to announce
the roll out of
Cayuse SP for processing sponsored projects
beginning July 1, 2019. Trainings for utilizing the new system will be provided for faculty on the following dates:
- May 20, 9:00-10:30 a.m. at Leadership Studies Town Hall (Zoom: 838-689-514)
- May 20, 2:00-3:30 p.m. at Leadership Studies Town Hall (Zoom: 123-637-583)
- May 21, 9:00-10:30 a.m. at Leadership Studies Town Hall (Zoom: 629-971-487)
Undergraduate and graduate commencement ceremonies
will be held this weekend on May 17 and 18.
Find the schedule here.
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- The Division of Human Capital Services will host a workshop providing templates and hands-on-guidance for participants to create both an accessible course syllabus and a Canvas course homepage on May 20 at 11 a.m. in Calvin 306. Learn more.
- Take advantage of an opportunity to hear directly from federal agency representatives and meet one-on-one with agency decision makers at the Small Business Innovation Research Road Tour stop in Kansas City, Kansas on May 21. Find more information and register.
- The Midwest Regional 3D Symposium will explore how 3D the field of direct manufacturing, digital imaging, and 3D processing is changing dramatically. The symposium will take place on June 7 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City, Kansas. Read more and register.
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Listen to the latest Global Food Systems Podcast with Dr. Segenet Kelemu
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Dr. Segenet Kelemu is a native of Ethiopia and alumna of K-State. Dr. Kelemu is, by training, a molecular plant pathologist. Following a postdoc at Cornell University, she worked fifteen years as a senior scientist with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture where she eventually became the leader of Crop and Agroecosystem Health Management.
In 2007 she decided to move back to Africa to work on agricultural development. Currently, she is the Director General of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya.
Our conversation digs into some of the major issues African farmers are facing and the fascinating insect-centered solutions that Segenet and her team have developed.
"In 2018, Dr. Kelemu was recognized by Bill Gates, as one of five 'Heroes in the Field' who are using their talents to fight poverty, hunger and disease, and providing opportunities for the next generation."
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Potential NEH Summer Stipends Writing Clinic
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The Office of Research Development is considering conducting a Writing Clinic
during the summer for the National Endowment for the Humanities
Summer Stipends
program. The clinic would be a stepped, mentored approach for developing a Summer Stipends submission including idea development, writing strategies and outlining for each of the key required sections, and review by mentors at each stage of the development process.
To help ORD determine whether to conduct such a clinic, we would like to assess the interest in participating in this program.
We are looking for both mentors
(faculty with NEH experience, esp. Summer Stipends)
and participants in the clinic.
If you are interested, please send an email to ord@ksu.edu. Please let us know if you would like to be a participant or a mentor.
The NEH Summer Stipends opportunity is included in this week’s Funding Connection even though the 2019 guidelines are not yet out. We wanted to let faculty know about the potential clinic and this program before they left for the summer.
This is a limited submission program with a deadline about a month after the fall semester starts.
Some key dates for you to remember if you are interested in submitting to this program:
Notifications
(working title and a several sentence synopsis on your proposed topic) are due to ORD via ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu by August 1, 2019. If there are more than three faculty interested in submitting, an
internal competition
will be held with preproposals due by August 26, 2019.
Proposals
are due to NEH on September 25, 2019.
According to the Summer Stipends Program Manager, this program’s guidelines will be out a little later than the May 15 date given on the website. He felt they we be available at the latest by June 1. Also, he is planning an informational webinar on this program.
The time and date have not yet be set, but the webinar will likely be sometime in June.
ORD will send a notice once we know anything definite.
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Agency news and trending topics
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The US National Institutes of Health would be required to reduce its use of non-human primates in research, under a spending bill approved on 8 May by a committee in the US House of Representatives. The bill would direct the NIH “to accelerate efforts to reduce and replace the use of nonhuman primates with alternative research models” in its laboratories. It would apply to the 2020 budget year, which begins on 1 October 2019.
In March, a
study
published in the journal
Science
found that 501 species of frogs and salamanders had been driven toward extinction by killer fungi known as chytrid. That’s more than twice the previous estimate. Then earlier this week, a United Nations committee on biodiversity
announced
that human impacts are threatening the existence of some one million species, including 40 percent of all the amphibian species known to science, or about 3,200 species.
College mergers aren’t necessarily a sign of something bad. They shouldn’t be seen as just a last-ditch gambit by a college on the brink. In fact, mergers are a tactic that any number of successful colleges should probably think about right now. That has not been the conventional wisdom about higher-ed mergers. Ranch C. Kimball, a university trustee who has participated in more than 20 nonprofit and for-profit mergers over several decades, says it’s time that changed. I couldn’t agree more. Too often when merger talks begin, colleges “act ashamed about having that conversation,” Kimball told me. “It’s like you’re conducting a clandestine affair.”
Urbanization has been linked to increased overweight and obesity levels across populations
1
. However, evidence for this association has been based mainly on calculations of the body mass index — the most frequently used tool for measuring overweight and obesity — at the time of study. The dynamics of BMI change in urban and rural areas have not been investigated separately.
Writing in
Nature
, the members of the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration
2
challenge the idea that general BMI trends are mainly a result of urbanization.
A plan to entice 1 million people in the United States to volunteer for a huge study of health and genes is making good progress 1 year after its national launch, organizers said this week. The All of Us study run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, has recruited 143,000 participants who have already taken surveys and visited a clinic to give blood and urine samples. Another 87,000 have at least registered for the study.
An ambitious project to test the reproducibility of biomedical experiments by Brazilian scientists is about to get under way. The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative was launched last year by researchers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Now, the first wave of reproducibility testing is set to begin in August, with help from more than 60 laboratories scattered over 43 Brazilian research centres. The project is one of the first to test the reproducibility of scientific research from a particular country,
instead of a particular field
.
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k-state.edu/research
researchweekly@k-state.edu
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