This collaborative award provides support for the conduct of a CAREER proposal writing workshop to be held March 25 and 26, 2010, at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Provision is made for 150 attendees who will be selected from among the applicants giving priority to young faculty whose research will likely receive support from the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, and to members of underrepresented groups. The workshop will include a lecture on the basics of proposal writing, experiences of recent CAREER awardees, and mock panel reviews of actual recent CAREER proposals and of the attendees' own proposal summaries.
Previous similar workshops have attracted typically twice as many applicants as can be accommodated at the workshop. Previous attendees have enjoyed significantly higher proposal success rates, both with their CAREER and other proposals. Thus, it is expected that this workshop will provide information that will enable the attendees to write more competitive proposals and subsequently improve the quality of their research.