A one-day CISE-sponsored CAREER Workshop with participation from all three CISE Divisions will take place on March 30, 2012 at Drexel University. The agenda includes NSF leadership and former CAREER awardees who respectively speak on objectives and personal experiences with the program. The agenda also includes mock review panels. This gives attendees first-hand experience with the NSF review process and helps their understanding of evaluation criteria such as intellectual merit, broader impacts and the integration of research and education. For these panels, former CAREER awardees (from IIS, CNS, and CCF) will volunteer their past CAREER proposals as "case studies" for discussion. This CAREER Workshop gathers more than 100 junior faculty, including about 15% from schools that serve under-represented groups (e.g. HSBUs and MSIs). Such a workshop fills an important void; many junior faculty have little to no personal interactions with NSF. Thus, beyond the agenda, the workshop gives such young researchers opportunities to network with NSF leadership and colleagues from the CISE community. The workshop's intellectual merit stems from presentations that give attendees insight into examples of potentially transformative research and how CAREER played a critical role in shaping the field. The workshop's broader impact is underscored by a convenient location; Drexel's campus is based in Philadelphia, is easily accessible by all forms of transportation and, within a 300-mile radius of the city, there are more than 100 Ph.D.-granting universities.
The CAREER represents NSF's committment for the professional development of the nation's most promising junior faculty. Such development entails: establishing pioneering research (i.e. strong intellectual merit); the integration of such research in education; and dissemination to public audiences (i.e. broader impacts). As such, a Workshop was held March 30, 2012 in Philadelphia (Drexel University) to educate junior professors on: details of the CAREER program; sidebar time with NSF CISE Directorate Program Directors; proposal writing tips from past awardees; and a mock review panel. The CAREER workshop gathered (1) 68 junior faculty (3 from under-represented minority universities, and 5 were from teaching-focused universities; (2) 9 NSF CISE program directors from IIS, CNS and CCF Divisions; and (4) four CAREER awardees (Ben Raphael from Brown, Daniela Olivera from Bowdoin, Yan Lui for UT Dallas and Paul Oh from Drexel) who gave 30-min presentations on proposal writing tips. Six mock-up panels were conducted so that junior faculty could gain experience on how Program Directors conduct proposal reviews. Social media apps using Facebook and Twitter were also developed so that junior faculty could network both at the Workshop and in the future. As of July 2014, the Workshop organizers learned of 6 attendees who have successfully received a CAREER: Ani Hsieh, Andrea Forte, Rachel Greenstadt, and Michael Spear. The awardees attributed the Workshop to helping them compose their competitive proposals.
