About the Author
Dr. Michael Breton is the Associate Provost for Research at Adelphi.
What is New at the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs?
Michael Breton
breton@adelphi.edu
What was formerly the Office of Sponsored Programs has taken on a slightly new name and is now to be called the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP). What is in a name, you might say; why add the word “Research”? Only that, with the addition of Dr. Michael Breton as the new Associate Provost for Research, the office will try to provide more in depth services to help promote and sustain research and other scholarly activities across the university and across the disciplinary spectrum. The highly knowledgeable Dr. Mary Cortina remains as the ORSP Director, reporting to Dr. Breton, and Virginia Bruchhauser continues to provide vital support as our Administrative Assistant. Our basic mission is, as it has been, to enhance opportunities for obtaining outside funding in support of research and other scholarly work. But we will be making a big effort to develop a more personalized approach, aimed at the specific needs of the particular faculty member. As the new leader of the team, I have been scheduling a series of one-on-one meetings with faculty members to discuss their research aspirations and plans for moving forward with sponsored projects. I have offered in many cases to act as an internal “peer review critic” for proposals and projects at their very earliest stages of development and on through the proposal development life cycle. I intend to be out there recruiting others on campus to also help in developing the capabilities of this internal review process, which is entirely voluntary on the part of the project or program investigator. This kind of intense internal review and feedback has been shown to dramatically improve funding hit rates with outside sponsors. We will also be trying to bring in the views of outside experts wherever this seems needed or appropriate. In addition, we plan to help organize a small number of visits to major funding agencies in Washington, DC, where this seems appropriate, mainly to meet with program officers. This helps them to get to know us and us to get to know them, along with the more intimate details of the programs they run.
We will again be organizing the 5th Annual Adelphi Research Conference, which provides a venue for students to display and explain research in which they have been involved during previous semesters. The date for this event has been set as April 23rd , a Wednesday. Additional details will be sent to the whole campus community soon.
To help raise awareness of what our faculty are involved in, we are organizing what is hoped to be a series of intramural, interdisciplinary events to promote conversations and collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. The first of these is the Interdisciplinary Science Symposium, which will feature 10 brief (15 minute) presentations from Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics, all in one morning. The date for this event is Tuesday morning, December 11, from 9:00 am to 12:00 noon in Science 321. The event is open to faculty and students on an RSVP basis, up to the limit of the room (57).
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