Exploring new opportunities
We have steadily grown our research enterprise the past few years despite a plateau in federal investments in higher education R&D. Collaborations with industry or private foundations may offer alternative opportunities for you to advance your work. The Division of Research can help.
This semester, our Office of Industry Contracts – with support from the Clemson University Research Foundation and the Watt Family Innovation Center – has made a webinar series available to the campus community to help you initiate and navigate industry collaborations. The webinars bring valuable insights from top academic institutions and private industry. I encourage you to take a look at the schedule online and see how the Office of Industry Contracts can facilitate an industry collaboration for you.
Also this month, the Office of Research Development and the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations continue their Foundation Spotlight event series with a Feb. 21 presentation on the Spencer Foundation, which invests in research on education policy and practice.
We are investing in your research, too. The Division of Research is accepting applications for internal funding from the university’s SEED program until March 7. Last year, the SEED program provided grants to faculty in every college, helping them to initiate new research or complete a scholarly project. More information is available online here.
We have been successful securing federal funding in what has been a very competitive environment. I want to remind you that some federal funding agencies require you to complete Responsible Conduct of Research training. Our Office of Research Compliance will provide opportunities in March and April for you to obtain credit hours toward this training by attending one of its Brown Bag seminars. More details are available here.
The Division of Research offers numerous events and programs throughout the year to help you advance your work. We want our events and programs to be meaningful to you and would like to hear your feedback. Please send comments, suggestions and ideas to vpr@clemson.edu. In the meantime, I hope to see you at one of our events.
I was proud to report numerous achievements to the Board of Trustees this month:
- Our performance in all Carnegie R1 metrics have improved over the past two years, with the university’s overall average ranking for R1 metrics moving up nine spots from 101 in 2014 to 92 in 2016.
- Through Jan. 1, federal grant awards were the highest of the past five years at $65 million.
- The past several years, our research expenditures have grown steadily even as federal R&D investments flattened under discretionary-spending limits put in place by the Budget Control Act of 2011.
You are doing great work. Assistant art professor Todd Anderson recently joined Pablo Picasso, Francisco Goya and David Hockney with work on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. History professor Edwin Moïse, meanwhile, had a lengthy article in the New York Times to discuss a key event of the Vietnam War.
This great work, and more like it, will continue to put Clemson on a world stage. Thank you for your dedication to scientific discovery and scholarship.
Go Tigers!
Tanju
