Research Development promotes best practices in grant-seeking through outreach activities, workshops, seminars and individual and team consultations. Research Development’s grant-seeking programs help researchers learn how to think strategically about their research trajectory, how to cultivate productive research collaborations and how to most effectively communicate with funding sponsors.
In addition to direct programming, Research Development connects faculty, postdoctoral fellows and other researchers to institutional resources that can support their career development.
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Career Development Resources
The College of Medicine has made a significant investment in the future success of its faculty. A variety of career development programs can help junior faculty strengthen their grant-writing skills and expand their mentor networks and mentorship skills.
See all professional development programs at Penn State College of Medicine here, or explore programs of particular interest below.
EPPIC is a research and service center in Penn State’s Department of Applied Linguistics at the University Park campus. EPPIC benefits from a deep research base in the areas of advanced proficiency language learning, language for academic and professional purposes, language-in-use and language teacher education. The Department of Applied Linguistics has a 35-year history of successfully administering English language assessments and offering advanced language and culture instruction informed by the most recent research in the field of Applied Linguistics.
EPPIC team members are integrally involved in departmental research initiatives and have extensive experience teaching spoken and written English for Specific Purposes (ESP) to diverse multilingual populations.
EPPIC offers individual consultations to international students, J-1 scholars and post-docs for support with academic papers, projects, presentations, interviews, cover letters, pronunciation and more. EPPIC also offers workshops on academic writing, speaking and interaction in English in a U.S. university setting.
The annual Grants Academy program is for postdocs and faculty who plan to submit a grant application.
Grants Academy is a structured, non-credit workshop intended to assist participants with preparation and submission of an independent investigator-initiated grant application.
Applications include submissions to the NIH (such as R01, R21, K01, K08, K23), the American Cancer Society, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association (among others).
Participants will be asked to commit to submit a grant application, with support of their chair, in the summer/fall of each year. Participants meet monthly from October through April and are expected to commit approximately 10 percent of their time.
Throughout the year, Research Development hosts grant skills workshops that are designed to help investigators improve their grant-seeking skills and develop competitive proposal submissions. Many of these workshops are designed with the early career investigator in mind. But they can also serve as a wonderful refresher for more established investigators.
Research Development has recorded many of these workshops, which are hosted on our media channel.
The Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP) provides a foundation for the success of junior faculty at Penn State College of Medicine and Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
The program runs from September to May each year and consists of two components:
- A comprehensive curriculum delivered through a series of weekly lessons
- An individual project completed under the guidance of a senior faculty mentor (assigned by the JFDP leadership)
All MD students at Penn State College of Medicine must complete an approved Medical Student Research (MSR) project. Most MSR projects are undertaken during the summer after the student’s first year of medical school.
MSR projects can be in basic, medical, translational, clinical, social, and behavior research, and may use qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. It is the student’s responsibility to select an MSR project and to prepare a proposal for consideration by the MSR Committee. In addition, all MSR projects must have a designated research advisor – a person who has expertise in the student’s chosen area of research and who provides day-to-day supervision of his/her research project.
Fellows, residents, and other staff can serve as mentors if they have the expertise to support a potential project.
Research Development manages a proposal library to support College of Medicine researchers seeking guidance on how to structure a well-crafted proposal. Hosted on a dedicated SharePoint site, the library contains winning grant proposals for numerous mechanisms, including fellowships, career development awards, and investigator-initiated (e.g., R01-equivalent) mechanisms. Summary statements are often included, providing insight on the peer review and resubmission process.
To request access, please send an email with a brief explanation to: ResearchConcierge@pennstatehealth.psu.edu. Please keep in mind that access is view-only to protect the confidential nature of the library.
Collaboration Resources
Moving research in new directions often requires identifying new collaborators. But what’s the best way to start doing so?
Penn State College of Medicine has access to several tools that can help investigators branch out and identify mentors and potential partners within the Penn State system and beyond.
Penn State Research Portal (Pure)
Pure, an Elsevier product, is a searchable database that captures the scholarship of more than 5,400 researchers at Penn State.
Pure provides detailed information on scholarly output, publications, networks, citation data from journals and social media citations. It not only enhances the visibility of faculty research, but also gives investigators the ability to connect with potential collaborators and mentors across more than 250 other institutions that utilize Pure.
Funding Institutional
Funding Institutional is a searchable database of funder profiles, active funding opportunities and awarded grants. Coverage is global, including government, charitable organizations and academia and totaling more than 5,000 funding sponsors from more than 70 countries – and growing.
Updated on a weekly basis, the database includes more than 18,000 active funding opportunities and more than $6 million of awarded grants (1954 to present). Funding Institutional is available to all Penn State faculty and staff members. Funding Institutional offers numerous advanced search capabilities:
- Funding opportunities can be searched by applicant career stage, degree requirement(s) and organization type.
- Active funding opportunities can be restricted to show only recurring funding announcements.
- Users can receive funding suggestions based on their Scopus profiles, seniority and activity location.
- Funder profiles deliver snapshots of current opportunities by discipline and funding type.
- Award data allows researchers to gain insights on funder priorities and potential collaborators.
To access Funding Institutional, users need a connection to a Penn State IP address.
NIH RePORTER
The NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORTER) is a publicly accessible website that provides a central point of access for reports, data, and analyses of federally-funded research from the NIH and several other federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Health Resources and Services Administration. The RePORT tool includes both active and expired award data from 1991 to the present. In RePORT, users can conduct simple keyword searches or narrow a search by defining various inputs, including institution, department, investigator, funding mechanism and award size.
Penn State is a research-intensive institution that has the infrastructure to support cross-campus research collaborations. Here are some ways Penn State researchers can work together.
Affiliate with a Cross-Campus Institute
Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI)
Penn State CTSI is a collaborative effort of Penn State, Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and Penn State College of Medicine.
Social Science Research Institute (SSRI)
The mission of Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) is to foster novel, interdisciplinary research that addresses critical human and social problems at the local, national, and international levels. SSRI sends out weekly email announcements that include information about upcoming events and funding opportunities, as well as institute announcements and news. To join that email list, email a request to L-SSRI-subscribe-request@lists.psu.edu.
The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences (“The Huck”) encompass a highly successful group of interdisciplinary institutes comprising faculty from colleges and departments across the University system. The four institutes that comprise The Huck are: Genome Sciences Institute, Infectious Disease Institute, Institute of the Neurosciences and Ecology Institute. To join their email list, email a request to L-HUCK-BIG-UP@LISTS.PSU.EDU.
Request a Toolbox Workshop
Research collaborations thrive when team members establish ground rules for navigating conflict. The Toolbox Project helps teams to identify potential sources of conflict by walking through a series of 34 statements that probe participant views on the practice of science.
Serving as dialogue prompts, these statements structure a conversation among participants that reveals fundamental research assumptions and generates mutual understanding at a deep level.
Research Development is available to facilitate these two- to three-hour workshops with PIs and their teams. Workshops will be scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis and should include a minimum of four and a maximum of 12 participants.
The Toolbox Project promotes communication within teams and are particularly valuable in the context of researchers from multiple disciplines, professions or sectors.
Contact the Research Concierge to schedule a session
Attend a Networking Event
Millennium Café – University Park
Started in May 2012, the Millennium Café is a forum for interdisciplinary research dialogue that connects researchers across Penn State. Sponsored by the Materials Research Institute, this networking event was traditionally held on a weekly basis at the Millennium Science Complex (MSC) on the University Park campus. The series draws more than 75 researchers MSC Café Commons. After a break from the program due to COVID, the
Millennium Café returned as an in-person event on April 19, 2022.
Visit the website to sign up for the Millennium Café mailing list.
Here are ways investigators can take control of their image and consider the many ways to heighten their visibility in the research community – at Penn State and beyond.
ORCID
ORCID provides a persistent, unique digital identifier distinguishing one researcher from another. This makes it less likely that one investigator’s name will be confused with another researcher with a similar name, ensuring that everyone gets the credit deserved for their work.
Unlike a work email address or identification number, ORCiD follows the investigator from institution to institution. Researchers can include their ORCiD on publications and grants and link it to other services, such as LinkedIn and Pure.
Penn State Research Portal (Pure)
Pure, an Elsevier product, is a searchable database that captures the scholarship of more than 5,400 researchers at Penn State. Pure aggregates research information from internal and external sources and enhances the visibility and discoverability of research at Penn State, both internally and externally.
Penn State College of Medicine faculty with a professorial rank at any level have a Pure profile created automatically in the month to two months following their hire. Publications and citations from Scopus begin to filter to the Pure profile automatically after the new profile goes through Elsevier’s refinement process, which happens approximately once per quarter.
The Pure profile is one of the highest-ranked Google search results for an investigator’s name. Because of this, regular review of the included information, and the addition of details on research interests, clinical interests, prizes and institute affiliations, are a great way to boost online presence.
Learn more about Pure or request profile updates
The Conversation
In 2016, Penn State’s Office of the Senior Vice President for Research joined with Strategic Communications to enter into a partnership with the website The Conversation, an academic blog written by university researchers for general audiences. The Conversation has a Creative Commons license, so other news organizations can republish its written pieces.
Since partnering with The Conversation, Penn State researchers have written about 140 articles that have garnered 10.6 million readers. Penn State faculty have had articles republished on sites such as The Washington Post and Business Insider.
Penn State’s Office of Strategic Communications receives regular requests from editors at The Conversation for expert sources. In turn, staff within Strategic Communications at the University level, and within Marketing and Communications in the Colle of Medicine, reach out to faculty members with expertise in the requested subject areas, seeking their written works on various issues of public interest.
Faculty with topics of interest should contact Zach Sweger, College of Medicine science writer, at zsweger@pennstatehealth.psu.edu.
See all Penn State stories on The Conversation
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to enhance visibility. Its Profiles feature functions as a landing page for publications, but that functionality only works if the profile is set to “public.” Double-check profile visibility by logging in and, at the top of the main page, confirming that it reads “My profile is public” beneath the affiliation information.
If that does not appear, click the “Edit” button at the top of the profile, select “My profile is public,” and then click “Save.”
ResearchGate
ResearchGate is a social networking site designed specifically for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. It has many of the features that are typical among social networking sites, such as user profiles, messages that can be public or private, and methods for finding other users with similar interests. Users can follow research interests, as well as individual users.
ResearchGate also has a blog that allows users to write reviews on peer-reviewed articles, post a research question, or share information in private chat rooms.
LinkedIn is a professional networking tool that currently has more than 20 million members in 200 countries. Investigators should consider updating their profiles to emphasize specialized skills and career trajectory.
Research Resources
Penn State College of Medicine provides the tools and resources investigators need to navigate their way through the stages of research.
College research administration and support teams are designed to help investigators succeed in their research efforts as they strive to:
- Find funding sources
- Prepare proposals
- Negotiate agreements
- Issue subagreements
- Ensure compliance
- Succeed commercially
- Manage post-award
Numerous resources are available both in Hershey and at University Park for investigators seeking “in-house” expertise with study design, generation of preliminary data, data analysis and biostatistical support.
Individual researchers and their areas of expertise can also be found via Pure, Penn State’s research portal.