COSAM News Articles 2020 April Message from Ed Thomas, Jr. - Research Status

Message from Ed Thomas, Jr. - Research Status

Published: 04/14/2020

To COSAM faculty and research staff:

I know that the last few weeks have been quite stressful with the disruption of research activities that has been caused by the spread of COVID-19. I truly appreciate how all of you have adapted to our new working conditions brought on by social distancing and made adjustments to ensure that our staff and students remain healthy and safe while also continuing to engage in your important research work. I wanted to provide you with a few pieces of information about COSAM research operations.

Although many of our research activities have undergone some dramatic adjustments, there are a number of time sensitive projects (e.g., observations of plant and animal species at specific times of the year) and lab safety activities (e.g., animal care) that must go on in order to maintain “research continuity” once this crisis has passed. Faculty members can make requests through the Associate Dean for Research and the Dean, who will then forward the requested to the Provost, in order for these kinds of activities to proceed. So far, the Provost has worked with us to make sure that critical projects can continue.

While proposal development and contract and grant management activities within COSAM have shifted to remote operations, we are continuing all of our operations without interruption. Most of the federal funding agencies are maintaining their typical proposal submission schedules and the COSAM Research Office has continued to work with the departmental contracts and grants staff and faculty on proposal submission. We want to encourage all faculty members to continue their proposal preparation activities and to reach out to us if you have any questions at all.

Finally, I want to again thank all of you for your continued patience and understanding through this difficult time.

Back in February (in the pre-COVID-19 restrictions era!), the COSAM Research Office had announced the initial plans for a COSAM Proposal Development on May 5, 2020. After a number of internal discussions, we believe that this event is important to the success of our faculty and we are making plans to proceed with a virtual workshop on that date.

COSAM Proposal Development Workshop

SAVE THE DATE: Tuesday, May 5, 2020, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.

AUDIENCE: Early career faculty and post-docs

Main and Breakout sessions: Conducted via Zoom

Workshop activities:

Brief introduction to grant submission resources
Broader impact opportunities in COSAM
Breakout sessions
- Post-doc session
- Topical, small group sessions
Closing session “virtual panel”

A new feature that we would like to include this year will be breakout sessions where faculty that have had recent successes in grant activity will lead small, focused groups of three to five people in a topical discussion of strategies for the successful development and management of research grants. We hope that faculty and post-docs may want to take advantage of these small sessions.

To help us with the planning of workshop activities, we ask that you fill out the form below by Wednesday, April 15, 2020: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/1eedb46f7994471db9ecd1a4b0b7a45b

If you have any questions about this event, please feel free to contact me at: etjr@auburn.adu.

Best regards,