This award supports the conduct of an National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) proposal writing workshop. The workshop will be held at a site chosen and hosted by the University of Connecticut, April 4 and 5, 2011. It is expected that there will be about 150 attendees. The workshop will have a one-and-a-half-day format including a training session on good proposal writing practices, testimony from previous CAREER awardees, a mock CAREER proposal panel review, and a review session during which the attendees will have a chance to obtain reviews on project summaries of their own draft CAREER proposals. The attendees will also have an opportunity to interact with NSF Program Directors both one-on-one and in mock panels.
This workshop will help to prepare young faculty for careers in education by giving them tools and skills of good proposal writing and by preparing them to write and submit better CAREER proposals. The results of the workshop include training for young faculty, better opportunity for young faculty with an emphasis on women and minority faculty, higher award success rates for the attendees, and ultimately better research resulting from better written proposals.
Outcomes of the 2011 NSF CAREER Workshop This project was conducted in concert with CMMI-1104328 This Outcomes report is a duplicate of the report submitted for CMMI-1104328 (authored by Dr. Robert Gao) which was awarded to the local sponsor of the workshop. Sponsored by the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMII) of the National Science Foundation, the CAREER Proposal Writing Workshop was initiated in 2004 and has been held each year thereafter. The Workshop aims to provide future CAREER proposal submitters (i.e., untenured junior faculty members as well as post-doctoral fellows, and near-graduation Ph.D. students) with proposal review experience and interactions with NSF program directors and recent CAREER awardees to improve their proposal writing capability. Since its inception, the Workshop has been widely recognized by junior faculty across the country as an excellent venue for educating the next generation academic researchers. Participation in mock panel review sessions and interactions with other workshop participants have been recognized as the major intellectual merit as well as benefit to attendees of the Workshop. The 2011 NSF CAREER Proposal Writing Workshop, held in Hartford, Connecticut during April 4-5 and organized by University of Connecticut as the local host, has attracted a total of 141 junior faculty members from 87 different universities. During the Workshop, NSF program directors and recent NSF CAREER awardees shared their insight and experience on how to write a winning proposal. The participants were then grouped into individual mock review panels that are designed to simulate the actual proposal review process at NSF. Through such intensive participation in the process and interactions with other participants, an environment was created to promote and facilitate collaborations among the Workshop participants. Such collaborations are likely to positively affect their future career development as researchers and classroom teaching as educators. This in turn helps develop the human resources of the nation, thus broadly impact the society at large. To assess the outcome of the Workshop, a study was conducted by Dr. Robert Gao, Co-PI and Workshop Co-Chair from the University of Connecticut, and his then Ph.D. student Shaopeng Liu. For this purpose, NSF grants awarded to Workshop participants after the completion of the Workshop, from June 2011 to September 2012, have been summarized. It is shown that a total of 31 NSF awards were received by the Workshop attendees during this period of time, constituting approximately 22% of the Workshop attendees. Among the 31 NSF awards, 7 were CAREER Awards, which make up 5% of all the participants. Because of the complex nature of the proposal review process, the above statistics do not necessarily establish any direct, quantitative correlation between attending the Workshop and winning an NSF award. On the other hand, the Workshop has been widely recognized as an excellent venue for education and information gathering on how to write winning NSF proposals, as evident in the exist survey by the Workshop attendees. Of the 111 attendees who participated in the survey: 1) 84 attendees found the Workshop "Very satisfactory", and 23 found it "Satisfactory", in terms of the learning experience gained; 2) 96 attendees would "Definitely" recommend the Workshop to future CAREER proposal submitters; 3) 81 attendees gave an overall rating of "Excellent" for the Workshop, and 25 gave it "Very good". Table 1. Workshop and award statistics Workshop Summary Statistics Number of participants 141 Number of institutes/universities 87 Number of awards received after Workshop 31 Percentage of Workshop participants 22% Number of CAREER Awards Received 7 Percentage of Workshop Participants 5%
