Sponsored Research News
April 29, 2009

Richard Riman's talk scheduled for May 4 has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled in the fall.

Cliff Davidson, a patent attorney in NY and graduate of Rutgers, will give a seminar on patenting on Friday, May 1 at 10am in CoRe 301. Rutgers is working o streamline its patenting process and Cliff will help clarify the role of the inventor and the role of the attorney in patenting.

Abstract

Mr. Davidson will be discussing the basics of patents, including information that needs to be included in a patent application, the standards for patentability, and the examination process. The goal of the presentation is to provide the attendee with a basic understanding of what steps they must undertake to file a patent application through Rutgers University, and to enable prospective inventors to understand how to research the field of their invention and prepare an invention disclosure.

Bio

CLIFFORD M. DAVIDSON, Esq. is a founding partner at Davidson, Davidson & Kappel, LLC, an Intellectual Property law firm with offices in New York City. He received his BS in Pharmacy and his JD from Rutgers University, and is a member of the New York and New Jersey Intellectual Property Law Associations. Mr. Davidson specializes in patent-related matters, including patent prosecution, freedom to operate and infringement opinions, due diligence and tech-transfer, and patent litigation. He is a named inventor on U.S. patents, and has written and procured patents in many technical fields.

The stimulus package is creating extra workload at NIH, NSF and other agencies. Please help them out. If asked to review, try hard to rearrange your schedule to make it work for them. If not asked, consider volunteering. Federal officials are unlikely to be able to take vacations this summer and I'm sure they'll appreciate the help you can provide. It's also a great a way to see examples of both excellent and terrible proposals and learn what mistakes to avoid.

To volunteer to review at NIH, send your CV to the CSR Scientific Review Officer who oversees a review group that might use your expertise. Find an appropriate review group or study section by going to our Review Group Descriptions Web site. Each study section description page has a link to a roster, which includes a link to the Scientific Review Officer. http://cms.csr.nih.gov/PeerReviewMeetings/CSRIRGDescription/. To volunteer at NSF contact the program director of a program that is relevant to your research. You can find the programs at http://www.nsf.gov

During his talk, Haym Hirsh from NSF gave many tips on funding. Some are repeated below and most are applicable to all agencies.

A good proposal is a good idea, well expressed, with a clear indication of methods for pursuing the idea, evaluating the findings, making them known to all who need to know, and indicating the broader impacts of the activity.

• Be true to the science
  • It won't be funded if it isn't an exciting project
• Submit your best ideas, not all your ideas
  • Spend more time on key proposals
  • Don't build a negative reputation
• Don't write a "trust me" proposal
• Gradually ramp up your funding
• Propose a project that matches your proposed duration
  • Don't propose a 1 year or 10 year project for a 3-year program
• Think about the reviewers
  • It's not for them to figure out your brilliant idea, it is for you to make it impossible to miss it
  • Your reviewers may not all be in your narrow area
  • You are not writing a paper
  • Grab the reader within 3 pages or you're likely lost
• Proofread (and print a sample!) before final submission
  • Reviewers HATE missing references, typos, etc. - it reflects lack of appreciation of their time
  • It is YOUR responsibility if the budget has an error that puts it over budget limits, uses the wrong font, goes over on pages, won't print, etc.
• Seek feedback from colleagues with NSF awards or who have spent time at NSF
• Work hard on your Project Summary
  • Affects where it is reviewed, reviewers selected, etc.
• Do not submit multiple similar proposals to different programs at the same time
• Read the solicitation and follow all instructions
• Don't ask for an extension
• Contact Program Directors:
  • To understand reviews and decision
  • For help figuring out the home for an idea
  • If unhappy with reviews, don't complain, explain
  • Ask to serve on a panel
  • Ask about EAGERs

This is the first solicitation for the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E). ARPA-E is a new organization within the Department of Energy (DOE), created specifically to foster research and development (R&D) of transformational energy-related technologies. Transformational technologies are by definition technologies that disrupt the status quo. They are not merely better than current technologies, they are significantly better. Often, a technology is considered transformational when it so outperforms current approaches that it causes an industry to shift its technology base to the new technology. The Nation needs transformational energy-related technologies to overcome the threats posed by climate change and energy security, arising from its reliance on traditional uses of fossil fuels and the dominant use of oil in transportation.

ARPA-E will fund scientists and technologists to take an immature technology that promises to make a large impact on the ARPA-E Mission Areas and develop it beyond the "valley of death" that prevents many transformational new technologies from becoming a market reality. The "valley of death" generally occurs in two phases. The first phase occurs at the point of determining whether a laboratory stage technology can ever become a real-world technology or it has some inherent unsuitability for real-world applications. Once it has been determined through R&D that the apparent barriers can be overcome and how they may be overcome, then additional investment from many other sources causes a new field of technology options to open up. The second phase of the "valley of death" occurs at the point of developing the immature transformational technology to the point where key risks have been lowered enough that industry can invest in the final stages of development and incorporate the technology into products.

The mission of ARPA-E is to overcome the long-term and high risk technological barriers in the development of energy technologies that can achieve the following, with no direct detriment to any of ARPA-E's Mission Areas:

1. Enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of energy technologies that result in-
   1. reductions of imports of energy from foreign sources;
   2. reductions of energy-related emissions, including greenhouse gases; and
   3. improvement in the energy efficiency of all economic sectors; and
2. Ensure that the United States maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.

http://arpa-e.energy.gov/keydocs/ARPA-E-FOA.PDF

Concept Paper Closing Date: June 2, 2009, at 8:00 PM Eastern Time

Summer Stipends support individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to scholars and general audiences in the humanities. Recipients usually produce articles, monographs, books, digital materials, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly tools.

Summer Stipends support full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two months.

http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/stipends.html

Applications for NEH Summer Stipends must be received by Grants.gov by 11:59 Eastern Time on October 1, 2009

To see an overview of all NIH recovery act opportunities, see http://grants.nih.gov/recovery.

A new opportunity was recently released by NIH for faculty at universities that have less than $6M in annual funding over the past few years. Both Rutgers Camden and Rutgers Newark are eligible .

See http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-OD-09-007.html

Application Due Date(s): September 24, 2009

Purpose. This NIH Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is supported by funds provided to the NIH under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 ("Recovery Act" or "ARRA"), Public Law 111-5. The purpose of the Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) program is to stimulate research in educational institutions that provide baccalaureate or advanced degrees for a significant number of the Nation's research scientists, but that have not been major recipients of NIH support. These AREA grants create opportunities for scientists and institutions otherwise unlikely to participate extensively in NIH programs, to contribute to the Nation's biomedical and behavioral research effort. AREA grants are intended to support small-scale health-related research projects proposed by faculty members of eligible, domestic institutions.

As part of the Recovery Act, NIH invites through limited competition AREA grant (R15) applications to support new biomedical, behavioral or clinical research projects proposed by faculty members of eligible colleges, universities, schools, and components of domestic institutions. It is anticipated that investigators supported under the AREA program will benefit from the opportunity to conduct independent research; that the grantee institution will benefit from a research environment strengthened through AREA grants and sustained by participation in the numerous and diverse extramural programs of the NIH; and that students will benefit from exposure to and participation in scientific research in the biomedical, behavioral and clinical sciences. As such, these grants are well suited to the goals of the NIH under the Recovery Act, which are to stimulate the economy, create or retain jobs, and have the potential for making scientific progress..

The AREA program is primarily a research grant program and not a training or fellowship program. Active involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in the proposed research is encouraged, and reviewers will consider whether the proposed project will expose undergraduate (preferably, if available) and graduate students to meritorious research. However, the application should not focus on training objectives and training plans should not be provided.

The following restrictions apply to the PI:

• May not be the PD/PI of any active NIH research grant including another AREA grant at the time of award of an AREA grant (although he or she may be one of the project personnel for an active NIH grant held by another PD/PI).
• May not be awarded more than one AREA grant at a time (although he or she may hold successive new or competing renewal AREA grants).
• May not submit an application to NIH for another research grant for essentially the same project proposed in a pending AREA application (in accordance with the general NIH prohibition against the submission in the same review cycle of more than one application for the same work).

The Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program seeks to reveal new understanding about the properties that systems of people and computers together possess, and to develop a practical understanding of the purposeful design of systems to facilitate socially intelligent computing. By better characterizing, understanding, and eventually designing for desired behaviors arising from computationally mediated groups of people at all scales, new forms of knowledge creation, new models of computation, new forms of culture, and new types of interaction will result. Further, the investigation of such systems and their emergent behaviors and desired properties will inform the design of future systems.

The SoCS program will support research in socially intelligent computing arising from human-computer partnerships that range in scale from a single person and computer to an Internet-scale array of machines and people. The program seeks to create new knowledge about the capabilities these partnerships can demonstrate - new affordances and new emergent behaviors, as well as unanticipated consequences and fundamental limits. The program also seeks to foster new ideas that support even greater capabilities for socially intelligent computing, such as the design and development of systems reflecting explicit knowledge about people's cognitive and social abilities, new models of collective, social, and participatory computing, and new algorithms that leverage the specific abilities of massive numbers of human participants.

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09559/nsf09559.htm

Deadline: September 21, 2009

Faculty and students are encouraged to attend a unique event designed to educate, motivate and inspire those interested in start-up ventures.

Rutgers Entrepreneurship DayEconomic Growth through Innovation
Hosted by The BEST Institute
May 13, 2009 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Rutgers Student Center, College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ
Directions: http://maps.rutgers.edu/building.aspx?id=278

• Keynote speech by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
• Greg Olsen's, a self proclaimed serial entrepreneur will provide an inspiring talk on how he went from entrepreneurship to spaceship as the third private citizen to make a self-funded trip into space.
• A lively panel discussion chaired by Inc.'s Deputy Editor Mike Hofman will focus how to start a business and formulate a growth strategy.
• Rutgers Business Plan Competition Award Ceremony - top five finalists compete for a total of $35,000 in prizes
• Elevator Pitch Forum and Poster Session - networking opportunity and a forum for start-up companies seeking funding

Join us on May 13th from 1:00 - 5:00 pm at the Rutgers Student Center, 126 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 To RSVP, please visit www.best.rutgers.edu/rsvp

This event is free but registration is required. To RSVP, please visit www.best.rutgers.edu/rsvp