Charleston, SC | February 27-28, 2006 | Partner: Medical University of South Carolina
Workshop Goals
The goals of each RRPA workshop will be to explore some of the following topics:
What is needed to make regional research partnerships work?
What initiation and nurturing strategies make the most sense?
How much money and time is required?
What is the requirement for special management expertise (e.g., in research projects and in state and local science and technology policy)?
What kind of NSF resources, programs, and assistance might be helpful for initiating and nurturing EPSCoR regional research partnerships?
What mechanisms can be used to attract other funding from state, federal, and industrial sectors?
Background
The EPSCoR Centers Development Initiative (CDI) is funded by NSF to provide technical assistance to research teams in the EPSCoR states competing for NSF centers and other large-scale projects. In addition to helping EPSCoR research teams compete for centers and large-scale projects, CDI’s portfolio contains some longer-term, more strategic activities aimed at assessing and building EPSCoR research partnerships that may lead to centers competitiveness. These activities have emerged from the exploration of Centers Initiation and Centers Infusion in CDI’s initial proposal and the experiences that CDI has been involved in via its outreach activities. CDI plans to continue to explore this important area via Research Partnership activities during the supplement period.
While Centers Initiation was designed, to quote from the original proposal, to “initiate and strengthen proposals from EPSCoR states through direct consultation and assistance,” the concept of Centers Infusion was designed to “serve EPSCoR states and institutions that have considerable expertise in an appropriate area, but do not yet have the ‘stand alone’ capacity to construct a competitive center proposal.” Centers Infusion would “broker partnerships and collaborations between EPSCoR states and established centers” and would “identify, assess, and promote EPSCoR groups that can be linked to on-going centers funded by the NSF.”
CDI has actively pursued the concept of centers infusion, but the lack of anticipated NSF funds has severely limited mechanisms to ‘seed’ these kinds of partnerships. CDI has adapted by exploring other potential, longer-term partnership and collaboration activities involving clusters of EPSCoR research strength. Under the original award, CDI and NSF agreed that centers initiation represented the technical assistance activity of most vital importance to the EPSCoR community, especially as it required establishment of a centers development infrastructure that could later be used to explore centers infusion. Now that this infrastructure has been developed and as the concept of centers infusion has been expanded (beyond infusing into ongoing centers and toward bringing together research groups that are strategically planning for centers development), it is productive to utilize the centers development infrastructure in order to further explore EPSCoR research partnerships.
Along the lines of Research Partnership, CDI’s workshops have represented a national level forum to bring together EPSCoR researchers from different institutions to interact and potentially collaborate. The workshops have cut across a wide range of disciplines in which there exist EPSCoR research strengths, including green chemistry, materials science and engineering, nanoscale science and engineering, computer and information science and engineering, Cyberinfrastructure, biological sciences, environmental sciences, and graduate education and research.
CDI plans to conduct background research into EPSCoR states’ plans for future research partnerships and work with the EPSCoR states – balanced across geographies and disciplines – to hold four Regional Research Partnership Assessment (RRPA) workshops.
Research Partnership activities represent a vital, emerging component of CDI’s portfolio for the same reason that centers infusion is an attractive mechanism – i.e., they serve EPSCoR states that have strategically-developed research strengths but not the critical mass nor ‘stand alone’ capacity necessary to compete on their own for NSF centers or large-scale projects. By collaborating in a strategic, research partnership manner with similarly placed EPSCoR research groups, these efforts may be able to more effectively develop EPSCoR center competitiveness.
Contact
For more information, contact CDI's Director: Rand Haley (randhaley@earthlink.net, 770-993-5256).