New internal USC Award: We are happy to announce a new USC seed grant – the R&D Research Priorities Award (deadline April 4th, 2022). The USC R&D Priorities Award provides seed funding for interdisciplinary collaborative research activities involving groups of faculty from multiple schools who are preparing a proposal for an externally funded grant in areas of R&D priorities outlined by the federal government. Upcoming deadlines also include: Zumberge Individual (Monday, March 7, 2022); Zumberge Diversity & Inclusion (Monday, March 14, 2022) and Zumberge Interdisciplinary Large (Monday, March 21, 2022). Information on all ORIF funding opportunities can be found on our funding page. All deadlines are at 5 pm.
New USC Research and Innovation (R&I) Website: Our new website is now live – please come visit us! We want to promote you! Please add/update the information for your centers/institutes, shared resources, funding opportunities, diversity programs, student and postdoc programs, events, and COVID-19 funding, resources and research to help us make our website an asset for everyone.
Open Science Framework (OSF): Since 2018, the Quick Files feature has allowed users to upload public files to the OSF without a project for easy sharing and collaboration. Quick Files will be discontinued, and the files previously uploaded as Quick Files will be migrated into a public project for each user on March 11, 2022. If you have any Quick Files, they are accessible here, into a new public project, where you can continue to view, download, and share your files.
Mentoring and Training Workshops: Spring 2022 virtual CER workshops have been posted. For March: ARPA-H and TIP: New Federal Research Funding Programs; Strategies for a Mission Agency Young Investigator/Early Career Award, How to Obtain NIH Funding. Register here. If you’d like to be updated about upcoming workshops, join our mailing list. Do you have an idea for a CER workshop? We’d love to hear from you.
FEDERAL LANDSCAPE UPDATES: DoD has released the 2023 DoD Multidisciplinary Research Program of the University Research Initiative (MURI) FOA to address high-risk basic research. White papers are due May 16th. NASA has released its 2022 Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES-21) announcement, soliciting basic and applied research. Due dates vary by research program. NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is establishing a CISE Research Visioning activity (CISE-RV). This will be coordinated by Viterbi and the Viterbi Vice Dean for Research.
USC STEVENS CENTER FOR INNOVATION: A license agreement was completed with the startup company Apogee Composites LLC for intellectual property that was developed in Professor Steve Nutt’s laboratory at the Viterbi School of Engineering. The IP licensed to Apogee aims to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to produce high-quality composite structures. The company aims to manufacture and sell customizable through-thickness permeable prepreg — materials such as carbon, fiberglass, and kevlar that have been pre-impregnated with a resin system.
OPRS/IRB: As of Monday, February 28, 2022, the IRB has worked through the backlog of new exempt and expedited studies held over in the queue from November and December of 2021. We are now reviewing new exempt and expedited studies from the middle of January 2022 onward. This means we have reduced the wait time to 6 weeks, down from 13 weeks. We expect the wait time to continue to shorten as we have implemented new procedures to address the remaining backlog. We have also set a target of maintaining a 4-week wait time (for new exempt and expedited studies) as soon as possible. We believe that we can accomplish this goal in the next month. Thank you for your patience and understanding over the past several months. We recognize that this has put a strain on the entire research community. We also continue to be in need of additional members for our Biomedical IRB Committees and a Board Chair for Biomedical IRB 3 (Continuing Reviews). Please contact Julie Slayton at jslayton@usc.edu if you are interested.
CONTRACTS & GRANTS: The Department of Contracts and Grants is happy to announce the launch of our new website! Found at dcg.usc.edu, the new website contains updated materials and a more robust and intuitive layout. As a reminder, USC faculty and staff can be kept up to date with important research administration news and announcements by subscribing to our mailing list. To sign up for DCG Newsflashes, simply send an email to Congelli@usc.edu with the subject line “Subscribe to DCG Listserv.”
DEPARTMENT OF ANIMAL RESOURCES: Dr. Ari Aycock-Williams has been appointed as Executive Director of the Department of Animal Resources (DAR) effective March 2, 2022. Dr. Ari Aycock-Williams will assume leadership of DAR from Dr. Donald Casebolt who has chosen to retire after more than 22 years at USC.