May 2005

Planetary Science: Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, Atmospheric Science. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) intends to release an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) after May 1, 2005, for a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO) Science Investigation.  This investigation must support the science theme of Mars Climate/Weather Monitoring identified by the MTO Science Definition Team.  The MTO science investigation will require providing a science instrument to be launched with the MTO mission in late 2009. The launch services and spacecraft will be NASA-provided resources.  Proposals in response to this AO will be due 90 days after its formal release.

A Preproposal Conference will be scheduled approximately 3-6 weeks after the AO is released.  Details for this conference will be provided in the AO. For more information about the MTO, go to mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/future/mto.html.

For the complete narrative of a successful Mars science proposal, see "Sedimentary Geochemistry of Martian Samples from the Pathfinder Mission," below this update box.

Applications are due June 3, 2005, for NASA's 17th Annual Planetary Science Summer School, which will hold two sessions this summer, July25-29 and August 1-5, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Partial financial support is available to a limited number of individuals to help defray the expense of travel and lodging only.  Applications are to be submitted electronically by June 3, 2005 at  http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/pscischool/.

April 2005

Potential proposers should be aware of a major change in the NASA proposal submission process from 2004. NASA has implemented a new master proposal data base system. All proposers, co-investigators, and proposing organizations must register with the system at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/. A significant change from the previous system is the requirement that the required, electronically submitted Cover Page / Proposal Summary / Budget Summary must be submitted by an authorized official of the proposing organization. Every organization that intends to submit a proposal in response to this NRA must be registered with the system. Potential proposers are urged to access the system well in advance of the proposal due date(s) of interest to familiarize themselves with its structure and enter the requested information.

A preproposal conference will be held on April 19, 2005, for the Interdisciplinary Exploration Science program described in Appendix D.2 of the NASA Research Announcement "Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences" (NNH05ZDA001N). This conference will provide an opportunity for potential proposers to discuss the objectives of the Interdisciplinary Exploration Science Program with NASA. It will also provide potential proposers the opportunity to form collaborations. NASA personnel will be present to answers questions concerning the Interdisciplinary Exploration Science Program as well as the proposal submission, evaluation, and selection process that will be used to select proposals for funding within the Interdisciplinary Exploration Science Program. The conference will be held in the Columbia Ballroom at the Capitol Holiday Inn, 550 C Street S.W., Washington, DC, 20024. Registration will begin at 8:00 a.m., and the conference will begin at 8:30 a.m. and will conclude by 12 noon. All participants are responsible for making their own travel arrangements. No advanced registration is required.

December 2004

NASA is reformatting its calls for proposals ("Research Announcements"). The following announcement was issued by NASA on December 5, 2004:

The Omnibus NASA Research Announcement (NRA) entitled "Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences - 2005 (ROSES-05)"

In late January 2005, the NASA Science Mission Directorate (which replaced both the Office of Earth Science and the Office of Space Science) will release a single NRA entitled Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences - 2005 (ROSES-05). ROSES-05 replaces the approximately 5-10 individual Earth Science NRA's that have been routinely released in previous years. The ROSES-05 NRA essentially covers every research opportunity in Earth and space science that NASA is soliciting in 2005. These research opportunities are referred to in this NRA as "program elements," each of which is described by a single section in the Appendix. The ROSES-05 NRA is very similar to the ROSS-04 NRA for space science, with the addition of approximately 17 program elements in Earth science for 2005. The ROSS-04 NRA may be found at
http://research.hq.nasa.gov/code_s/nra/current/NNH04ZSS001N/index.html.

November 2004

December 1, 2004 is the application deadline for summer research support under the Support of Mentors and Their Students (SOMAS) program in neurosciences based at Davidson College. These grants provide up to $10,000 for student and faculty summer stipends, student housing, and supplies. Support will also be provided for mentor and student travel to the Society for Neuroscience - Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience joint annual meetings. The grants are intended for junior faculty members at primarily undergraduate institutions who are at the beginning (typically, within 5 years of the PhD) of their teaching careers. Eligibility application guidelines may be found at www.somasprogram.org/.

The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) annual Dialogues will be held on April 17 - 19, 2005 in Arlington, VA. These Dialogues provide an opportunity to meet one-on-one with program officers of funding agencies, including NSF, NIH, DOE, NASA, USDA, and others. Attendance is limited, with a registration deadline of February 15, 2005. This is strongly recommended as a great place to network with grantmakers. Details at www.cur.org/05CURDialogues/05CD.html.

Applications for American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Alternative Energy Postdoctoral Fellowships will be considered next at the Winter (February) 2005 Advisory Board meeting. Applications must be received in the PRF office (1155 16^th St. NW, Washington DC 20036) by December 3, 2004. These fellowships are designed to encourage careers in research and engineering on energy production from sources other than the traditional fossil fuels. Further information at www.chemistry.org/prf.

September 2004

The American Chemical Society has published "And Gladly Teach," a resource book for chemists — but full of good advice for scientists and scholars of all kinds — who are considering academic careers. The focus is on career development for those interested in primarily teaching ("PUI") institutions, which however have expectations of a research effort.

www.nextwave.org. is the AAAS site for young scientists seeking to begin careers in research and teaching. Many features of the site are free to any user, and all are free to AAAS members. There are institutional memberships that cover all persons at that institution (a list of institutions is on the web site), and individual memberships are inexpensive ($19.95 per year at the present time). A feature of interest to readers of Getting Science Grants is the "Grants Doctor" which, though it is somewhat biased toward biomedical careers and research grants, nevertheless includes information of use in many fields.

July 2004

The American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund is accepting applications for grants to provide support for research sabbaticals for faculty in undergraduate science departments. ACS PRF Undergraduate Faculty Sabbatical (UFS) Grants were initiated to help provide full-year research sabbaticals at full pay for faculty from non-PhD granting departments. Sabbaticals should be at least 9 months long and performed somewhere other than the applicant's home institution. Summer salary can be requested with ACS PRF matching the institution's contribution for salary and benefits up to $45,000 or that equal to the applicant's annual salary, whichever is less. Up to $5,000 per award is also available for relocation, professional travel and/or research expenses, for a total award not to exceed $50,000. Eligibility for the UFS program is the same as for ACS PRF Type B grants. Additional information may be found on the ACS PRF website, http://chemistry.org/prf.

May 2004

The Council on Undergraduate Research has posted a collection of essays on establishing and encouraging research on undergraduate campuses. You can access it at www.cur.org/publications/aire_raire/toc.asp

What's the difference between preliminary results (which can often make the difference between a funded proposal and an also-ran) and scientific misconduct? PRELIMINARY RESULTS are incomplete, real laboratory data that are sufficient to convince you and a peer reviewer that the idea you propose can be worked out to a contribution that is worthy of publication. You commit SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT when you submit a proposal to fund work that is already finished, so you can use the money to initiate a new line of research that you think is too speculative to be funded. In order to pull this off, you have to be willing either to withhold from publication a completed piece of work (while your peers are busy working on similar research) or to have the same person read or review your research article who is also asked to review your proposal. These readers are not slow to inform the funder that the "proposed" work that the agency is considering supporting has already been done. The agency may respond with a sanction against you and/or your institution. And if that doesn't happen; if you get a grant for one idea and spend it on another, you have graduated from misconduct to civil fraud. Don't do it.

April 2004

The deadline for application for the 2004 Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award Program is June 24, 2004. The program supports and encourages young scholars who represent excellence in both academic research and teaching. The award provides a research grant of $60,000.

Other currently open grants competitions from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation include the New Faculty Award Program (Deadline May 13), the Special Grant Program in the Chemical Sciences (Pre-proposal deadline June 3), the Senior Scientist Mentor Program (Deadline August 26) and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program (Deadline November 11). Purpose, eligibility and application details for all Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation programs are available at www.dreyfus.org.

The author of Getting Science Grants offers workshops and one-on-one counseling on the writing of winning proposals and on profiting from peer review of unsuccessful ones. Learn more at www.science-funding.com.

March 2004

An updated version of the NSF Guide for Proposal Writing was posted on February 20, 2004. You can access it at www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04016/start.htm

The American Chemical Society's "Capitol Connection" page for February 2004 (www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1/acsdisplay.html?DOC=government%5ccapitolconnection%5cccFeb_04.html.) presents an agency-by-agency analysis of how Federal science funding fares in President Bush's FY 2005 budget proposal. Except for defense and homeland security, the increase (in current dollars) is limited to about 0.6%, or substantially less than inflation. The impact varies considerably by agency: NSF sees relatively strong support, with a 3% increase over FY 2004. Other agencies fare differently, with remarkable unevenness of impact within each agency. Links to the original budget summaries are provided.

The Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation supported an Undergraduate Research Summit meeting at Bates College on August 2-4, 2003. The disciplinary focus of the Summit was chemistry, but in fact the final report, released on March 1, contains useful insights and strategies and a series of white papers that pertain to most fields of scientific research in the Primarily Undergraduate Institution (PUI) setting.

Four 2004 summer school programs supported by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (PRF) are now accepting applications from graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, early-career faculty and senior faculty planning to change research fields. Faculties from colleges that do not grant Ph.D.'s also are eligible to apply for the program.

The 2004 summer school programs are:

Title: Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory and the Dynamics of Complex Systems
Dates and place: June 5-10, St. John's College, Santa Fe, N.M.
Application deadline: March 31
Link for program information: campus.umr.edu/tddft/tddft.htm

Title: Nanoparticle Materials
Dates and place: June 5-18, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti
Application deadline: April 23
Link for program information: www.emich.edu/public/coatings_research/ssnm/

Title: Crystallography for Organic Chemists
Dates and place: Aug. 2-13, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla
Application deadline: April 25
Link for program information: http://summerchem.ucsd.edu/

Title: Molecular Modeling Applied to Environmental Geochemistry
Dates and place: August 15-20, Penn State University, University Park Campus
Application deadline: April 30
Link for program information: www.cems.stonybrook.edu/Meetings&Workshops/Molecularmodeling.html

February 2004

The intake of proposals at the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) has increased so much that the agency has lengthened the lead time for proposals before each meeting from four months to five. They are presently (through approximately May, 2004) assigning newly received proposals to the October, 2004 review meeting. Investigators interested in ACS PRF grants should complete and submit their proposals as soon as possible before May.

Research Corporation announces deadlines for submission of Research Opportunity Awards (5/1/2004) and Cottrell College Science Awards (5/15/2004). (Information at www.rescorp.org.)

Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Postdoctoral Awards in Environmental Chemistry: deadline 2/26/2004. Information at www.dreyfus.org/ep.shtml#proposal

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society announces a substantial grant program to support research on nervous system repair and protection in MS. Details of this program as well as information on other current and recently funded extramural research projects are available at http://www.nationalmssociety.org/research.asp

January 2004

The National Cancer Policy Board and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science have posted their publication, Large-Scale Biomedical Science: Exploring Strategies for Future Research on the Web. Scientists planning research in areas close to the biology-medicine interface can browse the table of contents, buy a copy, or read the entire text at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309089123/html/. Chapter 4 is a 49-page review of public, philanthropic, and private sources of funding for this area of research.

The clearing-house Web site for federal research grants, www.grants.gov, scheduled for launch in Fall 2003 is now fully operational. It is intended to serve as a uniform electronic information and application nexus for all US Federal grants programs. As such, it can be enormously helpful, or possibly enormously unwieldy. Time and user feedback will tell how it develops. It also includes a monthly PDF newsletter about Federal grants programs. Click on the link above to explore.

December 2003

The 10th National Conference of the Council on Undergraduate Research, with the theme "Crossing Boundaries: Innovations in Undergraduate Research" is scheduled for June 23-26 at the University of Wisconsin — La Crosse. Information and registration materials are available at www.cur.org/conferences/UW-LaCrosse/CUR04NatConfUWLaCrosse.asp. The deadline for reduced registration fee is April 15, 2004.

Grants opportunities for the next generation of planetary science probes through NASA are listed and described in detail at http://research.hq.nasa.gov/code_s/nra/current/AO-03-OSS-03/ao-03-oss-03.pdf.

The National Science Foundation has updated their Grant Proposal Guide, principally in the parameters of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program. You can download the new guide at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf042/nsf04_2.pdf

November 2003

The National Science Foundation regularly posts information on new research initiatives and grants programs. The starting place for monitoring these postings is the "Funding Overview" page, www.nsf.gov/home/programs/start.htm. Here is a sampling of initiatives posted within the last month:

Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program:
The long-awaited update announcement for the Instrumentation Development and Acquisition program can be accessed at www.nsf.gov/pubsys/ods/getpub.cfm?nsf04511 . The relationship of this program to the better-known CCLI grants is discussed in Chapter 2 of Getting Science Grants. Non-PhD-granting institutions should note that they are exempt from the normal requirement of a 30% institutional cost share for this program.

Directorate for Biology:
2010 Project: To determine the function of all genes in Arabidopsis thaliana by the year 2010. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04502/nsf04502.htm

Directorate for Geosciences and Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Division of Mathematical Sciences:
Collaborations in Mathematical Geosciences: The purposes of the CMG activity are: (A) to enable collaborative research at the intersection of mathematical sciences and geosciences, and (B) to encourage cross-disciplinary education through summer graduate training activities. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04508/nsf04508.htm

Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Division of Materials Research:
Instrumentation for Materials Research: Major Instrumentation Projects (IMR-MIP). This Program Solicitation establishes within the Instrumentation for Materials Research (IMR) Program in the Division of Materials Research (DMR) a new opportunity for support for the design and construction of major instruments, sited at major U.S. facilities, which cost more than $2 million per instrument. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03604/nsf03604.htm

Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, Division of Social and Economic Sciences:
The Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics (MMS) Program is an interdisciplinary program that supports the development of innovative methods and models for the social and behavioral sciences. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04504/nsf04504.htm

October 2003

New NSF Instrumentation Grants Programs: While Getting Science Grants was in production, the National Science Foundation announced a new series of grants programs aimed at chemistry departments who need to upgrade their instrumentation for teaching and research. The Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) program comprises three components:

• Departmental Multi-User Instrumentation (CRIF:MU). Information and proposal guides can be found at: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03563/nsf03563.htm
• CRIF:ID Instrumentation Development—a separate program solicitation will be issued in Fall 2003
• CRIF:CRF Chemical Research Facilities—a separate program solicitation will be issued in Fall 2003

August 2003

According to a recent news report in Science (22 August 2003, pp. 1030-1031), the National Science Foundation intends to downgrade proposals that do not adequately address the "larger societal impact" of the research proposed, such as showing a demonstrable effort to involve under-represented groups. A discussion of this and similar requirements can be found on pp. 49, 54, and 58 of Getting Science Grants: Effective Strategies for Funding Success.