Mar
30
2012
There’s an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitle “What to Say – and Not Say – to Program Officers” [of funding agencies].
There’s plenty of interesting advice here. I’m not sure that all of it is applicable to SFI, as we’re a much smaller agency to the NSF, and therefore, I believe, much more approachable. Nevertheless, readers of this blog might find some words of wisdom there.
Best bit of advice, in my opinion?
First, and most important, do your homework. Before reaching out with a question, seek out the answer on your own. Check the agency’s or program’s Web site, review the applicable guidelines, or contact your institution’s sponsored-research office. You may well find the answer in one of those places—and if you don’t, you’ll at least be able to frame the question more thoroughly.
You’ll also demonstrate that you’ve done your due diligence. Agencies revise their grant-making priorities, program guidelines, and staff assignments fairly regularly, so make sure that you’re working with the most current information available. What was OK last year may not be OK now (or vice versa), and the person you dealt with last time may have left or changed jobs. A bit of preparation beforehand will save time and potential embarrassment later.
And for those that are not successful in their grant applications:
Finally, if the program officer has to say no—and that will happen a lot—there are a couple of things to remember, whether that no applies to a request you’ve made or to your entire proposal. The first is that while program officers often have considerable discretion, they are nevertheless bound by rules that they probably didn’t make themselves. Be courteous even though you’re disappointed.
But don’t let your disappointment rob you of the chance to do better next time. Read any comments you received about the proposal; then put the whole thing aside for a few days or weeks. When you’re over the sting of the rejection, go back and reread the comments. Then call the program officer to discuss them and to ask how you could make the proposal better next time.
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Mar
27
2012
Steve Blank, an entrepreneur, investor and educator from Stanford writes about the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps on his blog.
This is an extremely interesting idea, and one which is somewhat similar, albeit on a larger scale, to our ownTechnology Innovation Development Award (TIDA) programme. As he describes it, the NSF Innovation Corps is an incubator for scientists, where they take their basic research developments and look at commercialization opportunities, and ultimately to prepare them to attract external private (Venture Capital) funding.
63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made ~2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward in commercializing their technology.
…
The 3-person teams consisted of Principal Investigators (PI’s), mostly tenured professors (average age of 45,) whose NSF research the project was based on. The PI’s in turn selected one of their graduate students (average age of 30,) as the entrepreneurial lead. The PI and Entrepreneurial Lead were supported by a mentor (average age of 50,) with industry/startup experience.
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Feb
20
2012
After a few very busy weeks, and little or no blogging, I had an opportunity to catch up on some recent articles related to SFI in the news over the weekend. So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here are a few of the stories that caught my attention:
Not specifically SFI related, but there’s a very interesting piece by Karlin Lillington in the Irish Times from a few weeks back about Universities having a lot to learn about start-ups.
“We’re still not obtaining any Irish high performance companies despite the efforts of funding research and technology transfer through organisations such as Science Foundation Ireland,” he [Dr. Rory O'Shea of the UCD School of Business] says. “When you really look at the companies, most are lifestyle companies, add-on consulting companies, rather than high impact companies.”
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Jan
11
2012
This is probably old news for anybody who follows this blog, but on Monday Science Foundation Ireland announced a new Director General: Prof. Mark Ferguson. Prof. Ferguson is formerly of Manchester University and is the co-founder of Renovo.
From the official press release:
Welcoming Prof. Ferguson’s appointment, Prof. Pat Fottrell, Chairperson of SFI, said “The SFI Board is delighted, following an extensive international recruitment process that commenced last year, to appoint Prof. Ferguson as Director General. Prof. Ferguson’s track record over the past three decades has been one of continued excellence in both the academic and commercial spheres, and his arrival marks the start of a new stage in SFI’s journey.”
Commenting on his appointment, Prof. Ferguson stated: “We live in exciting times for science, where endeavour and ingenuity are making a notable impact on the world around us. Through determination, sustained investment and the convergence of expertise across scientific, engineering and commercial disciplines, Ireland has leaped up the international rankings for its quality of research output. I am relishing the opportunity of working closely with SFI’s Board, staff, esteemed research community, commercial and other partners, to help continue this level of progress and influence. I am passionate about science, its commercial exploitation and its societal and economic benefits.”
Also covered in the Irish Times, RTE News, InsideIreland and many other venues.
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Dec
13
2011
ScienceInsider has a small piece commenting on SFI’s 2012 budget. This figure has been published at a national level for a few weeks, but it’s the first mention of it that I’ve seen in the international science press.
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Nov
17
2011
The Irish Government today published a document entitled Public Service Reform. This document sets out a strategy as to how the Government intends to update or reform the public and civil service over the coming years.
It’s not my place to comment on the nature of the reforms, or whether I agree or disagree with them, but I will highlight some proposed reforms outlined in the “Rationalisation of State Agencies” appendix to the document that might be of interest to those of us in the scientific community in Ireland. The following extracts are taken verbatim from the report:
- Merge Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology & Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Science into consolidated single council under HEA
- Establish the scope to merge Forfás into the Department
- Merge the Digital Hub Development Authority with Enterprise Ireland/IDA
- Commission for Communication Regulation: Merge with the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
- Expert Group on Future Skills Needs: Absorb into Department (Education).
- Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation: Absorb into Department (DJEI).
- Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government: Examine absorbing into Science Foundation Ireland.
From my reading of the report, there is no mention of PRTLI or HRB, nor any other mention of SFI, apart from the final bullet point above.
There is further commentary and analysis of the document on the RTE News website.
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Nov
10
2011
Last night, it was my privilege to be a judge for the Thesis in 3 competition, organised by the CLARITY CSET, in conjunction with their colleagues in the other eight CSETs.
The idea of the Thesis in 3 is very simple. It’s a rapid-fire competition, whereby PhD students in our CSETs have an opportunity to present their thesis work to a general audience. They get three minutes, and three slides to do so. Sounds simple, but condensing three or four years to highly technical and involved research into such a short time, and clarifying it to be understandable to the non-expert, is truly a difficult task. All 25 PhD candidates who entered the competition did so admirably.
On the night, we heard presentations on topics as diverse as the nanoscience of graphene, cancer biology, sensor networks, intestinal health, artificial intelligence, interference in wireless telecommunications, software engineering and speech processing. A great cross section of the work currently underway at the CSETs.
Despite the stiff competition, the judging panel of Dr. Keith O’Neill of Enterprise Ireland, Rosemary MacCabe of the Irish Times, Patrick Haughey of TodayFM and myself ultimately selected Eva Szekely of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) in UCD as the winner, for her talk entitled “Voices that Speak to You”. As part of her prize, Eva will get to present her talk at the upcoming SFI Science Summit next week, in front of an audience of the top scientists in the country.
Many congratulations to Eva, our two runners up, Arlene O’Neill of CRANN and Sean Fitzgerald of BDI, as well as all the other participants. A particular congratulations to Bridget Kelly of CLARITY, who is the mastermind behind the whole effort.
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Sep
9
2011
The 2010 SFI annual report was published yesterday. This gets some coverage in today’s Irish Times:
Ireland ranked 20th in the world for research in 2010, the report says. Irish research now ranks above the EU-27 countries and also the OECD average.
The foundation released payments of €150 million during the year and researchers receiving its support published just under 5,000 peer-reviewed papers during the year, an increase of 22 per cent on 2009.
The story is also picked up by the RTE news site:
There was also an increase of 44% in collaborations between scientific researchers and Irish industry. The foundation says this highlights a determination by the enterprise sector to innovate and increase its competitiveness.
"The day-to-day work of SFI-funded researchers is intrinsically linked to strategic sectors of our economy, from agri-food and energy to medical technologies and telecommunications," commented the Chairperson of SFI, Professor Pat Fottrell.
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Sep
5
2011
While we all realise that the world rankings for Universities (and probably most other things) is flawed, people still pay a huge amount of attention to them, and being higher is certainly better than being lower.
From today’s Irish Times:
TCD AND UCD have continued to slide down the world university rankings in a trend which will concern Government, business and heads of colleges.
The latest QS rankings – published this morning – show a substantial drop in ranking for most Irish universities.
TCD drops down 13 places to 65; UCD is down 20 places from 114 to 134. NUI Galway suffers the most dramatic fall, down 66 places to 298. UCC bucked the trend, up marginally from 184 to 181.
Not good.
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Mar
8
2011
HeyStaks is a startup originating from the SFI-funded CLARITY Centre for Science Engineering and Technology. It’s based on the idea of ‘social search‘ – that is, that they searches that you do on any of the major search engines will likely be of interest to those in your social graph, in much the same way that sharing your photos is of interest to (some of) them.
HeyStaks got a very nice write up on the widely read TechCrunch blog, coming from their DEMO conference:
HeyStaks uses a comprehensive back-end social search algorithm to drive highly relevant community filtered recommendations. The idea was developed over a number of years by group of scientists in Ireland and is now teamed up with Jonathan Dillon, former VP of M&A/Integration at Yahoo!. Dillon was part of the team that acquired Delicious, which offered a scaled-down (and relatively unsuccessful) version of Heystaks beginning in 2005. Part of the reason it didn’t take off, according to Dillon, was that social graphs and networks were not yet as pervasive as they are today.
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no comments | tags: clarity, heystaks, sfi | posted in Home