The Grant Process
CSU has been awarded $56.1 million in research grants; a notable
accomplishment as receiving a grant is a challenging process,
according to CSU officials and institute officials connected to the
grants.
Lynn Preston, director of the Engineering Research Centers
Program at NSF, said the two National Science Foundation grants
totaling $34 million announced Wednesday were the result of a
rigorous competition.
“The competition began with the submission of 77 proposals on
May 15, 2002, in a wide range of fields,” Preston said in an e-mail
interview. “These were narrowed down to 16 full proposals through
the peer review process. These 16 were reviewed and eight were
selected for a site visit. The final outcome was four new
ERCs.”
The grants were for an Engineering Research Center for
Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere and for an
Engineering Research Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and
Technology.
CASA will increase warning and response time for natural
disasters and the Center of EUV will develop laser technologies and
nanotechnologies to create powerful computer circuits.
Neal Gallagher, the dean of engineering, said receiving the
grants was not only competitive, but also time consuming.
“The proposals were among the best we’d ever seen,” Gallagher
said. “The actual process took about one year, but some people at
CSU started working on proposals three years ago.”
CSU and the other universities awarded NSF grants possess
several characteristics that lead to success in receiving a
grant.
“All have outstanding teams of faculty, strong commitments from
industry and promise to deliver exciting new technology and develop
a diverse new technical work force for these fields,” Preston
said.
V. Chandra, a professor of electrical and computer engineering
and assistant director of CASA, believes the grants will lead to
great opportunities for everyone at CSU.
“It makes the educational experience rich for everyone on
campus. The most important thing is the outreach; it is not just a
research project,” Chandra said.
In addition to the two NSF grants, the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National
Institute of Health, announced last Tuesday that CSU had been
awarded a $22.1 million grant for a Regional Biocontainment
Laboratory to research the progression of diseases.
“It’s a natural fit for us,” said Anthony Frank, vice president
of Research and Information Technology. “The diseases being studied
are the same sorts of diseases our faculty is already
tackling.”
The $22.1 million grant encompassed very comparable levels of
competition to the NSF grants, Frank said.
“It was a fairly typical NIH process – very long, very
detailed,” Frank said. “Specialists evaluate all applications and
write a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the
applications; the best scoring applications are selected to receive
the grants.”
NIH awarded CSU the grant for a Regional Biocontainment
Laboratory based on several factors, but primarily because of
technical merit and CSU’s ability to contribute to the overall
NIAID research agenda.
“America’s scientists have the commitment, creativity and energy
to equal the task,” said Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, in a
press release. “The new laboratories will give these dedicated
scientists space to conduct critical research, and equally
important, they will be able to conduct it safely.”
During the 2002-2003 fiscal year CSU was awarded approximately
$200 million in grants and ranks among the top 8 percent of schools
nationwide for average return rates on state investment.
“What we have is very strong,” said CSU’s Gallagher. “We’re
second to nobody.”
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