Month: June 2017

Celebrating CAREERs and postdocs

Spring has come early to Clemson’s beautiful campus. The color is returning after the mild winter drained it briefly. The gingko trees are unfurling their fresh, chartreuse leaves; yellow dandelions are poking through the grass and at the Musser Fruit Research Center the rolling hills are bathed in the light pink of peach blossoms – it’s easy on the eyes but not so good for the peaches.

With newness springing up around us, it’s a good time to celebrate two activities focused on young researchers: the Faculty Early Career Development Program referred to as CAREER awards and a new Office for Post-doctoral Affairs.

Notable careers

The CAREER awards are among the most prestigious grants given to young researchers by the NSF, NASA, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force and other federal agencies. It took three attempts for me to receive a CAREER Award. I learned more about proposal preparation and writing each time I applied, finally realizing that it’s a proposal that needs to be worked on continuously through the year to be perfected.

I encourage all eligible junior faculty to use all their available chances to apply. Beyond the prestige, the awards bring steady funding for about five years, removing a little bit of the pressure of research funding and allowing more time for actually doing research.

At the time of this writing, seven Clemson faculty are CAREER Award winners:

• Marissa Porter in Psychology received one of the very few awards given for social science research, building on her work to identify the best cohesion-building interventions for groups.
• Sophie Joerg in the School of Computing will use her award to perfect complex hand and finger movements in animation so virtual reality can include an important component of communication.
• Luiz Jacobsohn in Materials Science and Engineering is enhancing ways to identify short-term and long-term radiation exposure.
• Sapna Sarupria in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is studying materials that promote or inhibit the freezing process for water.
• Amin Khademi in Industrial Engineering is applying his expertise to the pharmaceutical development process, using data to get drugs approved safer and faster.
• Mishra Ashok in Civil Engineering is improving forecast methods for extreme drought conditions so water resources can be optimally managed.
• Simona Onori in Automotive Engineering will use her award to examine lithium-ion battery function and lifespan to find the best battery system configurations for use in the automotive, healthcare, aerospace and defense sectors.

We have posted online a list of all Clemson CAREER Award winners – those with active awards and those whose awards came years ago – so that junior faculty can seek them out for potential mentoring. You can see them at Clemson.edu/research/awards.

Post-doctoral Researchers

This month, the Division of Research launched the new Office of Postdoctoral Affairs to address the specific needs of postdoctoral scholars. The office is an investment in postdoc culture, providing professional development and training that foster fulfilling careers.

We also aim to build a sense of community among all postdoc scholars, who occupy an often-overlooked space between students and faculty. I have advised about 20 postdocs during my career. Their hard work and novel ideas have made significant impacts in my research program. Postdocs are a vital resource to a research university, and they contributions are felt beyond a research group, to include the university environment and the community. They also become our colleagues very soon.

Our new Office of Postdoctoral Affairs will collaborate with Clemson’s Postdoctoral Association to identify  and address the needs of our postdocs across campus, and we hope this resource will attract more postdocs to Clemson. Please visit Clemson.edu/research/post-docs for more information.

Please join me in congratulating our CAREER Award winners and celebrating our postdoctoral scholars. The Clemson Family is very proud of all your contributions.

Go Tigers!

Tanju

Dear Colleagues,

As some of you may know, I came to the United States in 1989 from Turkey to pursue graduate studies at the University of Michigan. Coming to America was an opportunity to fulfill professional and personal dreams in a country where the federal government valued science and engineering, and scholarship was apolitical.

In July 2016, a coup attempt in Turkey caused flights into and out of the country to be temporarily banned. This happened to be during a time I planned to visit my family there. My wife had arrived in Turkey before the coup attempt, and I was scheduled to arrive a few days later. After some delays, I was able to travel, but this was the first time I felt nervous and uncertain while heading to visit my family. Suddenly, being an American did not assure the freedom to travel to my home.

Several weeks ago, when immigrants who legally lived and worked in the United States were denied entry back into the country from overseas, I empathized with their fears and frustrations. And when our own alumna, Nazanin Zinouri, was not allowed to return to her home here, I felt the crisis personally.

Diversity and inclusion are hallmarks of American higher education, and especially of major research universities like Clemson. Our different races, cultures and religions make our campus a nexus of global perspectives. We are a tapestry of diverse threads, and we are stronger, more vibrant and more complex because of it. Whether our goals are to understand our value as human beings through literature, redefining transportation, conserving energy or understanding the genetics of agricultural crops – our research is more innovative and more valuable when our researchers reflect the world we serve.

After my first year as vice president of research, I am in awe of your dedication, your depth and your devotion to searching for understanding, and how that translates into educating generations who, very soon, will become our leaders. Clemson researchers are currently contributing to 1,200 active projects worth about $300 million.

This year, Clemson is on track to submit research proposals valued at more than $600 million. We also have significantly increased the number of grants awarded in the amount of $2 million or more, further confirming the caliber and success of Clemson faculty’s thinking about big, multidisciplinary, translational projects with proportional impacts. And, we are on track for the second year in a row to top $100 million in competitive research funding.

As Clemson’s research enterprise grows, let’s remember the value each of us brings to the whole. Our tapestry, with its weft of education and warps of innovation, discovery and scholarship, colored with diverse backgrounds, enriches the value we offer to our disciplines and our students. Every thread of our tapestry has merit, every thread is necessary to make us who we are.

Go Tigers!

Tanju

Dear Colleagues,

What a wonderful way to start 2017, with a national championship! Congrats to the football team, the coaches and all the other staff and students who made that possible.

Having a national championship is meaningful in so many ways. It boosts the morale for the entire Clemson Family and gives us something to be proud of – especially considering our star quarterback and several other players graduated just weeks before playing their last game. The win can also be inspirational and aspirational.

ClemsonForward set our aspirational goal: to be a major national research university.

Today we are announcing one of the first pieces of the plan to be put into play: more than $1 million in seed grants from the Division of Research to support individual faculty, teams of faculty and to invest in new equipment.

These grants, which will be awarded through a competitive process, will help prepare our research team to be perennial national players, by making us more competitive for research funding, more attractive to our outstanding faculty, staff and students, and more compelling for prospective faculty, staff and students.

The funds will be awarded in five categories:

Clemson Faculty Succeeds positions interdisciplinary faculty teams to successfully compete for significant external funding ($1.5 million or more) that will enhance the stature and distinction of the university in all key areas of research, scholarship and creative activities at Clemson University. It provides seed grants that support leading-edge research and scholarship that capitalizes on the existing intellectual capital at Clemson. Preference is given to projects that are multi-disciplinary, inter-institutional and that advance the ClemsonForward strategic innovation clusters: advanced materials; cyber infrastructure and big data science; energy, transportation and advanced manufacturing; human resilience; health innovation; and the sustainable environment.

The sole goal for each funded CU Faculty Succeeds grant is the successful submission of significant external research proposals.

Clemson Research Fellows provides grants to assist regular faculty, academic departments, centers and institutes in the hiring and training of qualified research faculty and post-doctoral researchers. Researchers may be hired to promote collaborative and creative interdisciplinary activities, research and demonstration projects, build a center or program or pursue a large funding opportunity. These grants may run for a maximum of two years; at the end of the two-year period, the researcher position is expected to be fully supported by the externally funded grants or the department. 

Clemson Major Research Instrumentation provides financial support to researchers for the purchase of major research equipment or to replace or upgrade major research equipment that will likely impact funding, scholarship and research productivity, and the probability of increased extramural funding. The equipment will have a useful life of at least five years and cost more than $50,000.

Clemson Seed provides two tiers of funding support to eligible Clemson faculty in either the initiation of research activities or the completion of a scholarly project or product. Priority consideration is given to faculty who may not have large start-up packages or significant financial research support and resources. Initiation activities can include establishing baseline data, completing a phase of a research project that will lead to greater funding opportunities or developing research partnerships with collaborators at other institutions.

In Tier-1 awards, projects or products for completion can include finalizing peer-reviewed publications, scholarly books, chapters in books, or showings as in the case of the visual and performing arts.

Tier-2 initiation awards must include a proposal to an external funding agency as one of its deliverables. This program replaces the University Research Grants Committee (URGC) proposal call.

NSF Engineering Research Centers awards small grants to assist eligible Clemson faculty teams in pursuit of funding from the National Science Foundation ERC program. Successful proposals will bring together multiple partners engaging in large-scale, long-term innovative, transformative and complex projects. The outcomes of the program are the successful submission of pre-proposals and full proposals, if invited, to the NSF.

For details, guidelines and instructions for applying go to the R-Initiatives web page.

With these initiatives and support, and future components of ClemsonForward, the Tigers football team won’t be the only champions: Clemson will excel and succeed in research and scholarship at the national level.

Go Tigers!

Tanju

December 2016

A gift of discovery
The holiday season is one of giving, and this year I am pleased to present the gift of discovery: a new online tool that lets anyone search for potential research collaborators at Clemson by topic or name, enhancing interdisciplinary research and scholarship activities across our institution.

The Research Expertise Discovery Suite, or REDS, is an online portal that displays networks of Clemson faculty connected by topics. It also lists publications, conference presentations, awards, grants and books.

For example, if you want to know who does psychology research with military or former military members, searching for those terms will result in a constellation graphic that shows you numerous researchers and their connections. Furthermore, Heidi Zinzow, Mary Anne Raymond, Cynthia Pury and Thomas Britt have worked together. By clicking on a faculty member’s name you can see a list of their recent publications to determine whose work would be most relevant to yours.

REDS is just one tool designed to propel Clemson toward its strategic goal of growing our reputation as a national research university. I hope you will find it useful. Please note that we released the very first version of REDS, and we will continue to develop and improve to make a valuable resource.

Finally, thank you all for your contributions to Clemson Research in 2016. It has been an exciting year for us, with record funding, record-setting gifts, newly organized colleges and significant contributions to the sciences, engineering, humanities and education. We have also extended our contributions beyond our campuses to the wellbeing and growth of South Carolina’s agriculture, advanced manufacturing and knowledge-based economies.

Thanks to all of our faculty, students and staff, Clemson will enter 2017 well prepared to increase our impact and move Clemson forward across the state, the nation and beyond.

Please note that we released the very first version of REDS, and we will continue to develop and improve to make a valuable resource.

Go Tigers!

Tanju