Competing for a federal grant is like “trying to get struck by lightning – in a good way,” John Kessler tells young researchers. If you can put yourself in the right position – by consistently getting very good to excellent marks from review panels — “you will get struck eventually. Not every time. But it will happen.”

Kessler should know. The associate professor of earth and environmental sciences has been “struck by lightning” often enough himself. He’s also served on review panels that recommend proposals for funding. So have Wendi Heinzelman, dean of the Hajim School; Paul Funkenbusch, professor of mechanical engineering, and Lewis Rothberg, professor of chemistry, all of whom participated in an AS&E workshop, sharing advice for junior faculty on how to increase the chances of getting “struck by lightning” with National Science Foundation grants in particular.

Their recommendations:

Write a proposal that stands out in the crowd

The faculty volunteers who comprise an NSF panel may divvy up proposals ahead of time, each reviewing several – but not necessarily all of the proposals – in detail before the full panel convenes. So it is important that your proposal “grabs the reviewer” reading it during that initial round. That person will be your champion when the full panel convenes, says Funkenbusch. Among the first proposals weeded out will be the ones that “no one is standing up and fighting for.”

The proposal should clearly state how you are addressing two key components  of an NSF grant: intellectual merit (the potential to advance knowledge) and broader impact (benefit to society). It should convince reviewers you are qualified to carry out the research. It also helps to have a backup plan to show your project can continue in other directions if your original premise doesn’t pan out.

And the proposal should convey as much as possible on the first page. “The best advice I got as a new investigator was to spend as much time on the one-page summary as on all the other pages,” Kessler says. “Reviewers are reading many proposals, and if you aren’t exciting them in that summary, there’s a good chance they’re not going to read the rest of your proposal with the detail that you need to get funded.”

“Especially if you’re a young researcher, try to propose something that has a ‘long runway,’” Rothberg adds. “If you can show how this could develop into a career niche where you are the expert in developing something new – that this is not something to just satisfy a particular RFP (request for proposals), but is something that has a real strategic, long-term vision to it –reviewers will appreciate that and will want to promote your research.”

Write a proposal that is understandable

Especially to someone outside your particular area of research. “It’s not a bad idea to have your spouse, parent, or sibling – someone who is intelligent but not an expert in your field – read your proposal. If they can’t tell you afterwards what the main idea is, and why it’s important, you need to go back and revise it,” Heinzelman says. That’s why it’s important to . . .

Allow time for others to review your proposal

The University needs five days to review your proposal before the filing deadline. Allow at least two and up to six weeks more to circulate your draft for comment from mentors in your department or colleagues in your field. “Going through a review before you go through the actual review process eliminates a lot of nonstarters,” says Rothberg. “Don’t be shy about asking people to do this; we’re here to help you.”

Get to know the program manager

Arrange in advance a visit in person, or at least a phone call to the program manager at the NSF division likely to review your proposal. Program managers can tell you if their division is the best “fit” for your proposal. Program managers who have gotten to know you and your research also are more likely to recommend your proposal if it is on the funding cusp. They can also arrange for you to . . .

Serve on a review panel.

“That is the most helpful thing you can do to help your own proposals,” Heinzelman says. “As a reviewer, you can see what makes proposals good and what makes them bad. Serving on review panels is also a great way to network with other experts in your field.”

Work with departmental grant administrators.

“They know all the little details, all the different requirements involved in filing for different grants,” Heinzelman says. “Give them enough time and they will find the things you messed up on.” AS&E grant administrators Debra Haring (arts and sciences) and Cindy Gary (engineering) can also provide a wealth of information about grant opportunities and tips on preparing a proposal.

Pay attention to details.

Read the NSF’s new unified guidelines  for writing proposals, and also read any additional requirements specific to the RFP you are responding to. Any deviation – even in font size or size of page margins – can result in a proposal being rejected by the software that filters proposals as they are submitted online.

For more information:

• Click here  to read how Douglas Kelley, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, incorporated many of these suggestions in crafting an NSF CAREER proposal that got funded on its first submission.
• Click here  for additional tips from the presentation.
• Click here for some common pitfalls to avoid in preparing NIH, NSF, and other grant proposals as well, prepared by the University’s Office of Research and Project Administration.

(Next: The Kearns Center can help you present a compelling broader impacts section.)

The breakdown of methane hydrates due to warming climate is unlikely to lead to massive amounts of methane being released to the atmosphere, according to a recent interpretive review of scientific literature performed by Carolyn Ruppel, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, and John Kessler, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences.

Methane hydrate, which is also referred to as gas hydrate, is a naturally occurring, ice-like form of methane and water that is stable within a narrow range of pressure and temperature conditions.  These conditions are mostly found in undersea sediments at water depths greater than 1000 to 1650 feet and in and beneath permafrost (permanently frozen ground) at high latitudes. Methane hydrates are distinct from conventional natural gas, shale gas, and coal bed methane reservoirs and are not currently exploited for energy production, either in the United States or the rest of the world.

The new review, published in Reviews of Geophysics, concludes that current warming of ocean waters is likely causing gas hydrate deposits to break down at some locations. However, not only are the annual emissions of methane to the ocean from degrading gas hydrates far smaller than greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere from human activities, but most of the methane released by gas hydrates never reaches the atmosphere. Instead, the methane often remains in the undersea sediments, dissolves in the ocean, or is converted to carbon dioxide by microbes in the sediments or water column.

The review pays particular attention to gas hydrates beneath the Arctic Ocean, where some studies have observed elevated rates of methane transfer between the ocean and the atmosphere.  As noted by the authors, the methane being emitted to the atmosphere in the Arctic Ocean has not been directly traced to the breakdown of gas hydrate in response to recent climate change, nor as a consequence of longer-term warming since the end of the last Ice Age.

Read more here.

In the early 1990s, Gurgaon was a small city in northern India that blended with the nearby farm fields and villages. Now Gurgaon and its environs have been transformed into a financial hub with modern office buildings, condominiums, and luxury malls towering over the former agricultural landscape.

Llerena Searle, an assistant professor of anthropology, details the factors and the relationships behind the sudden, even spectacular, growth of India’s cities in her new book Landscapes of Accumulation. She says that there’s more–or less–than meets the eye.

“While Gurgaon’s new buildings look like signs that Indian society has changed and become more global, they are actually speculative gambles, based on stories that predict those social changes.”

For example, during the 16 months she spent researching the topic in India, Searle often heard about growing demand for housing and increasing prosperity rates, driven primarily by the IT industry. But Searle’s research revealed that this is a story that real estate developers tell in order to attract investors.

In 2008, only one-half of one percent of India’s working population actually worked in IT. Ninety-five percent of the population earned less than $4,400 (US) per year – far less than the income needed to buy the luxury apartments developers were building.

Instead, speculation has led to fancy golf courses, high end malls, and ornate corporate headquarters that, instead of serving the public interests, cater to a shrinking minority of the population.

Read more here.

The concept behind microbial fuel cells, which rely on bacteria to generate an electrical current, is more than a century old. But turning that concept into a usable tool has been a long process.

Kara Bren, a professor of chemistry, and Peter Lamberg, a postdoctoral fellow, have made significant progress toward those ends. In a fuel cell that relies on bacteria found in wastewater, they have developed an electrode using a common household material: paper.

Most electrodes used in wastewater consist of metal (which rapidly corrodes) or less expensive carbon felt (porous and prone to clogging).

The paper, coated with carbon paste, is not only cost-effective and easy to prepare; it also has more than twice the current density than the felt model.

Their findings have been published in ACS Energy Letters.

“We’ve come up with an electrode that’s simple, inexpensive, and more efficient,” says Lamberg. “As a result, it will be easy to modify it for further study and applications in the future.”

Read more here.

The Eastman School of Music has announced the appointments of Chelsea Burns and Orit Hilewicz as faculty members in the Music Theory Department, and of Mara Culp as a faculty member in the Music Teaching and Learning Department. They will begin teaching at Eastman during the 2017-2018 academic year.

Burns is a preceptor of music at Harvard University. Her research interests include U.S. old-time, bluegrass, and country music; Latin American modernisms; popular music of the Americas; and the historiography and pedagogy of music theory. Her dissertation, Listening for Modern Latin America: Identity and Representation in Concert Music, 1920–1940, addresses Mexican and Brazilian compositions written during an especially turbulent political period. Through close readings of works by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Silvestre Revueltas, and others, Burns argues for multiple contexts and communicative possibilities for these compositions, often in ways that undermine official nationalistic narratives and mandates or reveal composerly ambivalence.

Hilewicz, a PhD candidate at Columbia University, researches the ways music analysis reflects the experience of performing and listening, while at the same time broadening and enriching those experiences. Focusing on 20th century music composed in the United States and Europe, Hilewicz’s interests include music and visual arts, music in multimedia works, set theory, analysis of post-tonal music, and analytical approaches to musical temporality. Her dissertation, titled Listening to Ekphrastic Musical Compositions, studies pieces that take other artworks—such as paintings, architectural spaces, and different music works—and examines the intertextual relationships between music and images.

Culp is a visiting assistant professor at Ithaca College. Her scholarly and research interests include improving speech using music, music education for students with special needs, collaborating with special education professionals, elementary general music education, and choral music. As a PhD candidate at Penn State, she is investigating the relationship between music aptitude and phonological awareness in elementary students with speech sound disorders.

Read more here.

The Humanities Center has announced two external and four internal fellows for 2017-18 whose research addresses the theme “Memory and Forgetting.” They are:

Daniel Blim, assistant professor of musicology, Denison University:  “Sites and Sounds of Remembrance:  Museums, Memorials, and Media in 21^st Century America.”

Benjamin Nienass, assistant professor of political philosophy, Montclair State University (beginning 2018): “Memory between Europe and the Nation:  The Recognition of the Armenian Genocide in Germany.”

Joel Burges (fall 2017), assistant professor of English: “Literature After TV.”

Evelyne LeBlanc-Roberge (fall 2017), assistant professor of art and art history: “’Les Attentes’ and ‘Wall+Paper’.”

Alison Peterman (spring 2018), James P. Wilmont Distinguished Assistant Professor of Philosophy: “Mary Shepherd Against the Associationists, on Memory and Causation.”

Steven Rozenski (spring 2018), assistant professor of English: “Remembering, Forgetting, and Denouncing Medieval Mysticism After the Reformation.”

“The theme of ‘Memory and Forgetting’ has proven extremely rich, as evidenced by this exciting range of projects,” says Joan Rubin, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center. “Congratulations to all of next year’s fellows.”

Click here to learn more about the fellows program.

The Conversation, an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, has published an article about the research of John Tarduno, chair and professor of earth and environmental scences, showing that a geographic anomaly in the Southern Hemisphere may be the source of the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic poles. Read more here.

Lynne Maquat, the J. Lowell Orbison Distinguished Service Alumni Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, who is being honored by the International RNA Society for her pioneering contributions to understanding RNA, her commitment to mentoring researchers, and her advocacy for young women in the sciences. Read more here.

Applications are invited for the 2017–18 University Research Awards. The request for proposals and applications is available online.

An application may be submitted by a faculty member (as the first-named, lead investigator) for a collaboration with faculty outside of the University, as long as matching funds can be guaranteed from the U.S. institutions in which non-University faculty members hold their primary appointments.

International collaborations also may be entertained with the same criteria, some of which may be in-kind support, if demonstrated before the submission review.

The deadline for submission is Monday, March 20.

Questions and completed applications should be directed to Adele Coelho.

Mitchell Gruber, History, “The Degradation of the Food Retail Landscape.” 10 a.m. February 17, 2017. Conference Room D, Humanities Center. Advisor: Thomas Slaughter.

Feb. 10: Noon deadline to apply for Center for Community Health mini-grants, which will be  awarded in March 2017.  Click here for the application form and instructions.

Feb. 15: “Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Vulnerable Populations,” presented by Kimberly Arcoleo, associate professor and associate dean for research. School of Nursing Clinical and Research Grand Rounds. This presentation will cover how researchers can better recruit for their studies, and identify issues and barriers of participation. Noon to 12:50 p.m., Helen Wood Hall Auditorium (1W304).

Feb. 27: 5 p.m. deadline to apply for Center for AIDS Research funding for projects that use the center’s Pharmacology Shared Resource to address key gaps in understanding HIV/AIDS pharmacology and therapeutics. Read more here.

March 20: Deadline to submit applications for a University Research Award of up to $37,500, matched by the applicant’s home school for a total of $75,000. The program provides seed money on a competitive basis for innovative research projects that are likely to obtain external support.  Completed applications should be directed to adele.coelho@rochester.edu. Click here to view the full RFP.

March 20: Deadline to submit applications for an AS&E PumpPrimer II award. Click here for more information. Faculty in the School of Arts & Science should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in the Hajim School of Engineering to Cindy Gary.

March 25: Brainstorming for the Healthy Weight Initiative, which aims to increase the proportion of people with healthy weight in Rochester and beyond. The goal is to identify potential collaborators and research topics in any area related to body weight development as a first step toward developing new transdisciplinary research teams to obtain more research funding.  For more information, contact Diana Fernandez.