Category: NSF

Success at grant writing

This skill is often called grantsmanship. It’s quite different from scientific research itself, but success in science these days requires excellence in grantsmanship as a necessary (albeit non-sufficient) condition.

Here is a great blog entry from SCIENCE on some basic grantsmanship skills. I highly recommend it as a starting point for our junior faculty at Krasnow, in addition to interested readers.

Defining high risk/high payoff

Click on the link above for the mandate from the US Congress to NSF on funding more high risk research.

And what constitutes “high risk”?
“Research driven by ideas that have the potential to radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept, or leading to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science or engineering, and that is characterized by its challenge to current understanding or its pathway to new frontiers.”

All is well at the NSF

Just got back from an NSF review panel–although getting back is really the wrong word–the National Science Foundation is located in Arlington Virginia, about a mile down Glebe Road from my house. What’s becoming ever more clear to me is that while there are indeed many parts of the US government that seem to be broken, the Foundation is one agency that works well. Every time that I return from panel or just a visit, I’m impressed with the institutional shared vision: funding the very best science with transparency and rigor.

Monday I’m off to New Mexico for the Fourth Decade of the Mind Conference. I’ll be blogging from the road if I can manage a decent internet connection. Then off to California for a quick visit to my Mom and the house I grew up in, about a block from Caltech in Pasadena.

Jim