October 31, 2018
Funding Connection

  • The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Navigating the New Arctic seeks innovations in Arctic observational networks and fundamental convergence research across the social, natural, environmental, and computing/ information sciences and engineering that address the intersection of natural, social, and built systems.
  • NSF’s Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure program seeks research to develop, deploy and integrate security solutions that benefit the scientific community by ensuring the integrity, resilience, and reliability of the end-to-end scientific workflow.
  • Read more of this week's featured opportunities
PreAward Services Staffing Update
We are pleased to announce that Greg Blackwell joined the staff of PreAward Services in October as a grant specialist . Greg spent the previous three and one-half years in the College of Veterinary Medicine as a client account manager and has a solid financial and customer service background that will support his new assignment. Greg will assume the assignments previously held by Rich Doan, who retired in August. 

Greg will provide central support for the research, outreach, and scholarly efforts of faculty and administrators in the College of Education, department of physics, department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, as well as the administrative units reporting to K-State vice presidents and the provost/executive vice president. Greg is currently working his way through an on-boarding and orientation process and will officially assume primary contact duties soon. In the meantime, if you are in one of the units listed above, please continue to reach out to Anita Fahrny ( afahrny@ksu.edu ) for assistance.

As a refresher, if you are not sure who your PreAward Services contact is, you can  view a list of our staff members and their assigned areas .

As previously announced, last year was a record year for extramurally funded programs received by K-State. Achieving this remarkable accomplishment required substantial effort across the entire academy. It certainly does require perseverance and deliberate proactive collaboration to sustain the upward trajectory of K-State’s quest to become a top 50 public research university. 

Experience and data continue to demonstrate the perseverance and competitiveness of K-State in securing funding for its programs. Now more than ever, it is extremely important to reach out to your unit administrators and/or your PreAward Services contact early on in your proposal development efforts to ensure that all of the units that support your efforts can deliver on their respective value propositions. It is not out of the ordinary for there to be hundreds of proposals in the queue at various stages of development at any given time. During peak periods, it is also not out of the ordinary for a daily submission total to hover around 30 to 40 submissions or more. 

Your efforts to contact your research support personnel early in the process are much appreciated, help balance the volatility of the number of proposals in the queue vying for immediate attention, and ensure that all requisite sponsor requirements are addressed prior to submission.

Wishing you all a very successful year.

— Paul R. Lowe, associate vice president for research and director, PreAward Services
Events and announcements
  • Please note deadlines for limited submission opportunities are coming soon! Send notifications and proposals/pre-proposals to ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu.
  • Art Works from the National Endowment for the Arts supports public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across the nation, the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, learning in the arts at all stages of life, and the integration of the arts into the fabric of community life. Notifications and internal pre-proposals are due November 6, 2018 and December 4, 2018, respectively. Find limited submission guidance.
  • NSF EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Track 4: EPSCoR Research Fellows (RII Track-4) provides opportunities for non-tenured investigators to further develop their individual research potential through extended collaborative visits to the nation’s premier private, governmental, or academic research centers. Notifications and internal pre-proposals are due November 7, 2018 and December 5, 2018, respectively. Find more information on limited submissions.

  • The Office of Research Development will offer two training sessions in November.
  • An Early Career Funding Opportunities Information Session on November 13, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in Union 207 will give an overview of young faculty programs (more than NSF CAREER!) and include a panel of faculty members who have received awards from NSF and DoD. Please register.
  • A Fulbright Information Session on November 29, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in Union 207 will give a brief overview of submission requirements and include a panel of K-State Fulbright Scholar awardees who will discuss their experience. Please register.
Science Communication Week
Join us November 5-10!

Don't miss your chance to participate in workshops to polish your scicomm skills, public talks and events centered around "The Food Explorer," and more!

Spots remain for the following events.

  • SciComm 101 with Jory Weintraub from Duke University: November 5, 9 a.m.-12 noon. Faculty spots remain; student spots are full. Read more and register.
  • SciComedy Workshop and Improv Show: November 5. The workshop is 6 to 7 p.m. Participants will then enjoy a meal and can watch On the Spot Improv perform science-themed improv at 8 p.m. Spots remain for students and faculty/postdocs. Read more and register.
  • Considering CRISPR: November 8, 9 to 10 a.m. Open to all; learn about the basic science and communication challenges behind gene editing. Read more and register.
  • Speed dating — Scientists and Communicators: November 10, 8:30 a.m. Spots remain for both scientists and communicators. Read more and register.
Many other events require no registration.
  • "The Food Explorer" book discussion: November 5, 7 p.m., Manhattan Public Library
  • Exploring "The Food Explorer" with author Daniel Stone: November 6, 7 p.m., Flint Hills Discovery Center
  • Science on Tap with Tendai Gadzikwa: November 7, 7 p.m., Tallgrass Tap House
  • The Art of Science Communication Through Story and Film with Rebecca Safran: November 8, 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon, Ackert 232
  • Graduate School Research and the State: November 8, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m., Fiedler Hall Atrium
  • "The Food Explorer" panel discussion: November 8, 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., Beach Museum of Art
  • Sunset Zoo's Science Saturday at Willie's Fun Zone: November 10, Brandeberry Indoor Complex, Bill Snyder Family Stadium, 9 a.m. to kickoff at 11 a.m.
Agency news and trending topics
If you are somewhere between the age when you get teeth and the age when you lose them, you are probably interested in candy. Since  Halloween  is the best night of the year to indulge your sweet tooth, it should be right up your spooky, deserted alley. You should know, though, that spooky, deserted alleys are actually very bad for Halloween celebrants interested in maximizing their hauls. And while you probably already knew that, maybe you’re not sure, exactly, what kind of place you should be prowling. The answer is out there, but, this being the night of horrors, finding it requires a spot of mathematics.

Federally funded agencies and institutions argue that taxpayers should be able to read publicly funded research, and that broader accessibility will allow researchers whose institutions do not subscribe to a particular journal to build on existing research. However, few empirical analyses have examined whether work supported by funding agencies with such mandates actually is open access. Here, we report the first large-scale analysis of compliance, focusing on 12 selected funding agencies. 
 
Studies that fail to find a positive result are often filed away, never to see the light of day, which leads to a publication bias that compromises the credibility of scientific literature. An analysis now suggests that registering and peer-reviewing study protocols before research is conducted could improve this ‘file-drawer problem’, and help to correct the existing publication bias towards positive findings.

In the not-too-distant future, fully autonomous vehicles will drive our streets. These cars will need to make split-second decisions to avoid endangering human lives — both inside and outside of the vehicles. To determine attitudes toward these decisions a group of researchers created a variation on the classic philosophical exercise known as " the Trolley problem ." They posed a series of moral dilemmas involving a self-driving car with brakes that suddenly give out: Should the car swerve to avoid a group of pedestrians, killing the driver? Or should it kill the people on foot, but spare the driver? Does it matter if the pedestrians are men or women? Children or older people? Doctors or bank robbers?

An ancient group of microbes that contains some of the smallest life forms on Earth also has the smallest CRISPR gene-editing machinery discovered to date. The peewee protein machinery, dubbed Cas14, is related to but one-third the size of the Cas9 protein, the business end of the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. While Cas9 was isolated from bacteria, Cas14 was found in the genome of a group of Archaea – a primitive relative of bacteria – that contains some of the smallest cells and smallest genomes known.
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