FAQs | Accelerating Research

OVPR is hiring additional staff in the pre-award and post-award areas (sponsored programs and grants management). This will significantly improve our ability to support investigators throughout the entire lifecycle of their grants. It will also allow us to expedite labor-intensive tasks such as proposal submission, setting up awards, executing sub-awards and paying sub-awardees, handling salary offsets and personnel transactions, carry-forward requests, no-cost extensions, reporting and close-out of awards.

It’s important to create a culture of collaboration that includes early career investigators, who are a driving force for research. The Provost’s Office is actively engaged in conversations about our assessment tools and promotion and tenure guidelines, focused on ways to reward collaborative effort and affirm its value, while still recognizing individual achievement.

Stony Brook is thoroughly committed to research and scholarship across all disciplines. We’re striving to more effectively integrate creative arts, social sciences, and humanities (CASSH) disciplines into our research mission, and we’ll continue to expand support based in part on the recommendations of the CASSH working group. Some of those endeavors include additional support within OVPR, new seed grants, and training for principal investigators and teams exploring interdisciplinary work.

Industry R&D funding is significantly larger and growing faster than federal funding, and there are many opportunities for universities to engage with industry partners. A primary objective of the realignment currently underway in Economic Development is to enable such connections. We are pursuing that through a strategy of directly partnering faculty with industry in our focus areas. It's also important to recognize that industry partnerships can make us more competitive and result in better success with federal funding.

There are many ways in which we can expanding opportunities for our clinicians to engage in research, and we’re working to make it easier for them to do so. A Clinical Research Working Group is focused on identifying issues and proposing solutions to the challenges specific to clinical investigators. Their report is expected before the end of this year.

Yes. We believe Tiger Teams present a winning model that can be expanded to other research and scholarly topics. However, the priority is to complete the first phase with real and concrete support for the Tiger Teams, and implement what they’ve learned. These Teams are focused on topics of interest to NSF, and many already include members from Creative Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. Upon completing the first phase of the NSF-based Tiger Teams, we will form additional groups to target areas of increased NIH funding and Creative Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.

No. Stony Brook is committed to excellence in teaching as it is fundamental to who we are. Teaching and research are mutually reinforcing; what we do in the classroom often inspires our research and vice versa. Our expectation at Stony Brook will always be excellence in both.

Undergraduate students participating in laboratory studies and field projects alike have made truly significant contributions to our research. Most of the connections occur at the department level, often when students become interested in a class topic. That will continue to be important, but we can also explore a more centralized clearinghouse for opportunities that would enable a broader reach across disciplines.