Sunday, June 29, 2014

Setting Expectations

As a faculty member, you have undergraduate and graduate students who contribute to progressing your research agenda. For those in departments with graduate degrees, you will spend a fair amount of time cultivating your graduate students. Incoming graduate students should realize the intent of graduate studies -- to train the students to be independent and critical thinkers and problem solvers. To increase the likelihood of receiving high quality work-product from your graduate students, you must set expectations of them and of you.

Research Advisor Expectations to Graduate Student Advisee
  1. You should have successfully completed at least 1 data structures, 1 algorithms and 1 database management systems course (MySQL/Oracle) prior to becoming an advisee. You should have high programming languages proficiency in one of the following: C/C++, Java, Python.  
  2. The advisee's funding through teaching or research assistantship is independent of the forward progress in both the coursework and MS Thesis/PhD Dissertation research responsibilities.
  3. Your Plan of Study document should be completed within the first month of second semester of matriculation. It may change due to course offerings; however, you should have a plan of what skills you would like to enhance while in graduate school.
  4. Be assertive by asking a lot of questions. This is crucial to make you a successful graduate of this program and, in turn, your career.
  5. Weekly Meeting Scheduling: To be set-up by advisee (preferably the same day and time for the duration of the semester),  which will last 15-60 minutes.
  6. Weekly Meeting Conduct: The weekly meetings are for the student and by the student. The advisee is expected to be in charge of the meeting. The advisee is expected to provide an agenda and email a copy to the advisor at least one hour prior to the meeting. The advisee has the responsibility to address all the task items outlined in the agenda. The advisor may add a task item that must be addressed in the next weekly meeting.
  7. Be timely to all meetings. Unless otherwise discussed, all meetings will be in the advisor's office.
  8. If a meeting must be cancelled, email the meeting invitees at least 12 hours prior to the scheduled beginning of the meeting. If it’s an emergency, please send a text message stating the following "emergency - no mtg" to my cell phone. Once the emergency is over, please provide greater detail either in person or via email, if necessary.
  9. All written manuscripts submitted to the research advisor must be proofread, spellchecked and complete. Partial or incomplete documents should not be emailed or given to the research advisor unless requested. 
  10. For Master's students, it is expected that you will graduate with at least 1 conference/workshop publication (submission acceptable, but paper acceptance preferred).
  11. For PhD students, it is expected that you will graduate with at least 2 conference/workshop publications and 1 journal publication (journal submission acceptable, acceptance preferred).
Research Advisor Code of Conduct
  1. Support advisee's career objectives. Many questions your coursework plans and research directions will be asked in order to ensure advisee's career objectives are understood and accomplished. 
  2. Instruct advisee on improving technical writing skills. Technical writing is a learned skill. This skill can only be learned with many drafts provided to the advisor and in-person meetings. The advisor will teach these skills at the willingness of the advisee. Do not be discouraged if your returned manuscripts is filled with comments.
  3. Be responsive to advisee correspondence. 
    1.  For an email sent by the advisee, an email response will be given within 48 hours. This response may not answer all questions as answering can be lengthy.
    2. For manuscript drafts provided by hard-copy or digitally, the advisee can expect written feedback on submitted text, graphs, papers or analysis within 5 business days.
  4. In the case of an accepted publication, the advisor will attempt to fund the advisee's travel and registration to the conference. It would then be expected that the advisee would deliver the paper/poster presentation.
  5. Be timely to meetings
  6. If a meeting must be cancelled, the advisor will email the advisee at least 12 hours prior to the scheduled beginning of the meeting. If it's an emergency, the advisor will send a text message stating the following "emergency - no mtg" to your cell phone if it's provided.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

To the Aspiring Black Female Scientist

Brandeis Marshall's childhood desk aka "study depot"
This week, Kyla's article listing 73 Black Female Scientists has ignited a conversation about Black women in STEM and our (lack of) visibility within the science community. Well, I received a question from an almost 4th grader, who I'll call Cali. How sweet and awesome is that?!? She asked for advice on how to become a Black female scientist and I'm sure she's not alone in her inquiry. This is for all the Cali's...
 


Dear Cali:

I was very happy to receive your email. Thanks for asking your question. The 73 of us have had our own path to scientist-status. First and most importantly, you should have good grades. Then, you should attend and graduated from college. I also strongly suggest that you consider pursing an advanced degree in your chosen discipline. Education can only help you achieve your goals. Be smart, confident and have a positive personality. Beyond that, let me share a few pointers. 

Reading. I love reading. If you love reading, then you would love learning everything from the mathematics and science to language and arts subjects. My summer vacations were spent reading fun books, such as the Sweet Valley High series, in addition to the summer reading books. I read everywhere. I used my at-home desk as my study depot that housed some of my fun books and school supplies. I encourage you to make your own "study depot" and read some fun books. 

Extracurricular Activities. To excel in any field, you dedicate your time and energies to learning your craft. It takes focus and balance. I love music and took dance lessons during elementary and junior high school. I also enjoyed sports - volleyball, basketball and track & field. I still enjoy dancing and watching basketball. Extracurricular activities help you stay active and healthy. They also build your teamwork skills, which you will use science project teams. I hope you have at least one non-STEM activity that you find fun and enjoyable.  

Next Steps. Science is a big field including biology, chemistry, computing, engineering, mathematics, technology and physics. You can exposing yourself to these different types of science so you can find the ones you like and the ones you don't. There are 1-day events to week-long summer camps for all K-12 grade levels. Check your local colleges for these events and camps. These programs usually have a cost for participation, but could have scholarships or discounted cost options available. Here's few examples to get you started:

Dream big, be positive and you will do some great things. 

Yours in STEM,
Dr. Marshall

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Research Financing


To execute a funded grant is to manage its budget. My graduate studies experience didn't include project management training: personnel, project deliverables/outcomes, project timelines, budgets, etc. This academic research budget starter kit is intended to spark conversations with your advisor, mentors, advocates and/or colleagues. To provide some concreteness to these budgetary matters, I supply some rough numbers where appropriate, but be sure to check your institution's rates. 

Understanding the inner workings of a research project budget and which expenses can be allocated to which account is just another skill to learn as a faculty member. The NSF provides a proposal budget template to get you started. Each line-item in the budget allocates monies to a specific need for the proposed project. Here's some relevant terminology that if you don't know, you should make it a top priority to know.  
  • PI: Principal Investigator, research project director
  • co-PI: assistant Principal Investigator, research project co-director
  • CY: calendar year, January 1st-December 31st
  • AY: academic year, traditionally August 15th-May 15th
  • Summer Salary: up to 10 weeks of wages and fringe benefits allocated to personnel during May 15th-August 15th
  • FTE: full-time employee
  • GA/RA/GRA: graduate assistant, research assistant or graduate research assistant
  • F&A: Facilities and Administration fees
Depending on the NSF solicitation, the research team comprises of one PI and up to 4 co-PIs. The distinction between the CY, AY and summary salary may be obvious to some, but just in case it isn’t here are a few comments. CY is a more flexible allocation, in which you can expense the grant monies at any time during the grant period, while AY or summer salary are typically designated to the 9-month academic year or 10-week summer period, respectively. Department Heads (or Chairs) may prefer AY monies allocation. Why? Chairs are primarily concerned about the academic year budget, e.g., how each faculty member is drawing his/her salary from which account, AY teaching assistantship allotments (based on course enrollments), travel and equipment, etc. So you, through your grant, can pay for your own wages and the Chair could re-allocate what would have been your AY salary & fringe benefits to other departmental budgetary activities. Your Chair could hold back these “departmental budget savings” from the AY budget and dispense some of it directly to you as summer salary.

Course buy-out. Each institution decides the flat percentage of a faculty member’s AY salary and fringe benefits that is needed to deliver a course. Each department sets the semester course load expectation. I'm most familiar with a 2-2 teaching load, in which I'm expected to teach 2 of the department's courses per semester. So for the department budget, 4 courses a year means roughly 50% of your employee contribution and duties go toward classroom instruction. The other 50% should be  for mainly research activities and some service. Let''s suppose that your base 9-month salary is $100,000 and the course delivery flat rate is 12.5%. If you have a course buy-out for each year of the grant, the funding agency will pay $12,500 of your salary and not the institution. This $12,500 is used by the Chair, with the assistance of the faculty member, to select and hire a temporary staff member (an adjunct faculty, lecturer or instructor) to deliver that course. An institution may have a flat temporary staff member salary rate of $7,000 per course. Given our example, that $5,500 differential could be re-allocated at the Chair's discretion. Special note to tenure-track faculty: A course buy-out prior to promotion and tenure may be perceived negatively by your promotion and tenure committees because you would not be contributing to the departmental course delivery needs.

Summer salary.  A faculty member has the responsibility to cover their own summer salary. Due to U.S. federal regulations, an employer (institution) can not pay an employee (faculty member) more than 50 consecutive weeks. When grant monies are routed through an institution, faculty summer salary serves an extension of the AY payroll. Thus, a faculty member has a maximum 10-weeks of summer salary to be on the institution's payroll. The advice given to me, and so I give it to you, is to try to allocate a couple of weeks in the summer for every funded project. Most research projects can not be relegated to AY activity. By allocating the summer salary line-item, you can secure pay goes directly to you and guarantee continued funded research project progress over the summer. Assuming your base 9-month salary is $100,000, two-week of summer salary is $5555 (= (100,000/9)/2).  Special note to tenure-track faculty: I would suggest that you reserve some of your summer to writing and submitting your scholarly work to journals and conferences. Be careful of burnout.

Other project personnel. Other senior personnel salary include in your budget are postdoctoral associates, other professionals, graduate and undergraduate students and any support staff. Postdoctoral researchers and other support staff have 12-month position appointment while graduate students are traditionally semester position appointments. Let's take graduate student personnel as an example. A graduate student can be paid as a 0.25 FTE, 0.50 FTE or 0.75 FTE as a teaching or research assistant. At an 0.50 FTE, the graduate student research assistant is expected to contribute 20 hours to the research grant activities. An institution has a fixed semester GRA rate, say $7,000, but there is also graduate fee remission, say $7,000. Graduate fee remission is a form of salary compensation and insurance where graduate employees are not obligated to pay full tuition and fees. The graduate students directly receives the GRA salary while the graduate fee remission is charged by the institution and paid by the grant monies. 

Fringe Benefits. Fringe benefits constitute the institution's charge for staff employee healthcare and other benefits. For each staff employee, the fringe benefits rate, say 27%, is considered a direct cost within a research grant budget. Assuming a 1 course buy-out from your base 9-month $100,000 salary, the salary and fringe benefits charge is $15,875 ($12,500 salary and $3,375 fringe benefits).

F&A: An institution's facilities and administrative are indirect costs charged by the institution to the funding agency. You know, an institution's contribution to infrastructure support of the research, e.g., post-award office personnel, travel and expense management software, the office space, electricity, ethernet and wireless network connection, etc., needed to host the proposed research. At many research institutions, the F&A rate is high, say 54%. You have read that correctly…54%. For every $1.00 you request from the funding agency, $0.54 is requested from the institution. F&A eats into your workable budget, but it is necessary.

So for a budget that a PI/co-PI with a 9-month $100,000 salary requests a course buy-out, 2-weeks summer salary and 1 graduate student for a year, the salary and fringe benefits direct cost is $36,929.85 ($15,875 course buyout, $7054.85 summer salary and $14,000 for 2-semesters of a graduate student) and the indirect cost is $19,942.12. The total cost is $56,871.97.

Whew, and I didn't even talk about domestic and foreign travel for PI meetings/workshops and conference travel or equipment needed to execute the research project! There is so much to learn about the internal and external business operations of your institution.

Final thoughts:
  1. Meet with your institution's pre-award grant office personnel
  2. Meet with with your institution’s business office personnel
  3. Meet with your institution's post-award grant office personnel 
  4. Maintain a good working relationship with your pre-award, post-award and business office personnel

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Scaffolding the Grant Writing Process

The grant writing and submission process is very much like the research process, e.g., "a meandering slow and fast, exciting and dull, frustrating and rewarding process over time and mostly in collaboration with colleagues”. The discussion of research grants can in no way can be handled sufficiently in a blog post, workshops, books or through human to human conversations. You only learn through experiencing it.

There is having a research project idea, there is effectively communicating that idea and there is receiving money to execute that idea. In the first year as an Assistant Professor, I was utterly blown away by the amount of time, brain-clock-cycles and knowledge about grant writing needed to just complete a proposal - let alone be awarded the funding. A flurry of questions swirled in my brain: How do I write a project summary or project description? What is appropriate to include in the project budget?  Why do I need to justify the budget in the facilities, equipment and other resources document? Is there a template for the biographical sketch? Can I see samples of biographical sketches, project summary and project description? Can I even do this? Who can mentor and guide me? I am just not prepared to do this. Why didn’t I learn these skills in graduate school or through my postdoctoral position? Was I just not paying attention?
 

Ok, OVERWHLEMED!
First, breathe deeply.
Second, continue reading.

I will speak on the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding stream given my familiarity with this government agency as a grant writer, grant awardee and proposal review panelist. NSF is divided into a number of directorates (or discipline-specific funding units), where computing falls into the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). CISE has 4 divisions: Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI), Computing & Communication Foundations (CCF), Computer and Network Systems (CNS) and Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). Each division manages grant competitions and funded awards through program directors and officers. 

For most grant writers, you are answering a call-for-proposal (CFP) solicitation. Now, I find NSF CFPs to be a cryptic read with some informative content. The General Information provides the list of program officers assigned to the proposal competition - a great point-of-contact to filter your proposal ideas to gauge the appropriateness of your proposal to the CFP. The Proposal Preparation and Submission Instructions tells you if a letter of intent and/or primary proposal is required aside from the full proposal and the associated deadlines. The Introduction and Program Description sections are intended to provide potential proposers’ insight into what NSF is aiming to address. The remaining of the CFP is all about process - award & eligibility information, proposal preparation and submission instructions, review procedures and award administration information. In total, an NSF CFP is about 10 pages with very small print and large side margins.
  IMHO, the grant writing process is akin to cooking. A recipe is really just a guideline, a suggestion of how to make food taste great (to the recipe creator). You have a recipe. Most people follow most of the cooking instructions. Most people use most of the ingredients.

Ingredients: 
1 very good to execellent idea
1 PI
Up to 4 coPIs
1-page project summary 
Up to a 15-page project description
list of cited references
Up to 5 PI and coPI biographical sketches
1 data management plan
1 budget document for project duration
1 budget justification
1 facilities, equipment and other document
(X) other personnel (post doctoral scholars, graduate students, undergraduate students, etc.)

Instructions: 
Regardless of if you are responding to an CFP or submitting an unsolicited proposal, successful research grants are about having the right people, addressing a timely problem and effectively executing a reasonable implementation plan within the funding timeframe. Start with talking to colleagues within and outside your discipline. People are so creative and discuss some very good approaches to open research problems. The plan can only be achieved when motivated, commonly goal-focused people decide to devise and then implement the plan. Does this sound difficult? Well, yes it is. The people-problem-plan triad is crucial to manage.   

The overall intent of the grant proposal is to supply clear and sustainable outcomes for your technical community while responding to this discipline’s science needs outlined by the NSF’s CFP and/or mission. The project summary has 3 parts: overview (mission and vision), intellectual merit (contributions) and broader impacts (sustainability). The project description is an expanded version of the project summary with a background, related work, research plan, tentative project timeline, evaluation & assessment, and qualifications of the research team. The budget, budget justification, data management plan and facilities, equipment and other documents are dictated by the NSF CFP, research team, project goals & outcomes. Consider incorporating the following components to your grant proposal: 






Godspeed!

To laugh (or cry) about one of my grant writing experiences, read Grant Submission: A Funny Story

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Research, Teaching & Service: Let's talk research

Research is not a series of step by step activities, but a meandering slow and fast, exciting and dull, frustrating and rewarding process over time and mostly in collaboration with colleagues. Research has interlocking elements of publications, student completion rates and funding. High quality and quantity of your publications is evidence of your ability to contribute to your selected discipline. Your student completion rate can be an indication of your social good contribution by shepherding undergraduates and graduate students to degree completion with good quality research experience. Your acquisition of funding dollars shows your ability to financially support yourself, your research and your student researchers. All three are tangible metrics to evaluate your “success” as an academic. Quite honestly, it also serves as your professional currency and your value add to an organization.

Publishing takes a lot of time and resources from idea germination to *hopefully* the published paper, article, chapter and/or book. To create, implement and evaluate an idea worthy of novel contribution to your selected discipline takes effective thought, planning and execution strategies. You should be mindful of the publication venue. The acceptance rate of the publication venue implies scholarly quality to some, if not most, promotion and tenure committees. The lower the acceptance rate, the more valuable your research appears to researchers unfamiliar with the specific discipline.For computing in general, conference papers are the common and recognized mode of publication. However, when it comes to promotion and tenure (beyond the departmental level), conference papers do not tend to hold as much value as refereed journal articles. I’m emphasizing this rule because I completely missed this nugget of advice.

When you are a faculty member, your daily tasks are divided between research, teaching and service. One commodity at your disposal is your department, institution and external colleagues, e.g., former graduate studies classmates, academic colleagues at other institutions, government and industry collaborators. Depending on potential collaborators’ career path and aspirations, a research partnership could be a win-win situation by sharing resources and responsibilities toward a common goal.

Another commodity you must learn to leverage is the (undergraduate and/or graduate) student researcher. Publication production can be aided by having students perform some research-related tasks, e.g., prior works’ paper summaries, software coding, tables, graphs and figures. More students doesn’t necessarily mean that more of your research will be completed. You will need to manage each student’s progress, which may take more time initially than you just doing the work yourself. It is important to expect some trial and error since each student’s personality requires you to impart some of your finesse to meet their needs.

Suppose the research is ready for a conference paper submission in 6-8 months. The time lapse for a top-tier conference paper (submission to conference event) is 6 months. By now, you are already 1 year invested. Undergraduate and graduate students may or may not be still working with you due to course load conflicts, changing interests and/or graduation. Graduate students are a bit more pressed for a submitted publication since it may be a condition of their graduation. You have trained some students, but most likely you will have to train a new group of new researchers each year. Now, assume your conference paper is accepted. (Note: if you are a graduate student reading this post, conference paper acceptance is not guaranteed. You will likely receive more rejections than accepts). The peer-reviewed remarks are returned and the camera-ready/final version of the paper must be submitted.

Is that it?
Nope.

To ensure the conference proceedings include your paper, at least one author must register and deliver the oral presentation at the conference. The cost of attending a conference can be expensive including conference registration, travel expenses (airfare or mileage, ground transportation to/from airport), hotel accommodations and food per diem.

Who is going to pay for you and/or your student to deliver the research presentation?

Now we come to the real matter: funding streams. Your funding may come from your department by asking your department administrators, your startup funds, internal awards sponsored through other academic units at your institution and external awards through corporate sponsorships or gifts and/or government agencies. You should only serve as principal investigator (PI) or co-principal investigator (coPI), which indicates you are a member of the research project leadership team. Even though Internal grants can be less competitive, external awarded grants have greater value and impact on your academic currency since the research problem, proposed solution and implementation plan has the peer-review/SME approval. In year 1 & 2 of a tenure-track faculty position, your startup funds  and requesting departmental funds can support your research activities. From year 3 and thereafter, other internals and external funding streams are expected to supplement your scholarly endeavors.

Q. What do you need?
A. Money.
Q. How much do you need?
A. As much as possible. Enough to pay for your annual summer salary (10 weeks), conference travel expenses, journal article publication fees, computing equipment, graduate students (tuition, fringe benefits and stipend), etc.
Q. When do you need it?
A. Now.

Translation: to increase your likelihood of getting a grant awarded, you must be regularly writing and submitting internal and external grant proposals. Consider your institution’s perspective: How many times has Faculty A asked for financial support? Sooner rather than later, Faculty A should be able to support herself and her research through other means.

For more information:

  1. Robert Boice. (2000). Advice for New Faculty Members. Pearson Publishing.
  2. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy. (2008). The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul. Lynne Rienner Publishing.