Learn how to utilize the Pivot database to find funding opportunities specific to your area of research, set up notifications, track funding opportunities, find collaborators, and share opportunities with your coworkers. Discover how the Office of Research, Foundation Relations, and Modernization support proposal development and grant management.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: thank you, for attending our, information session that is geared towards new faculty. This session is hosted by the Office of Research, Advancement and Strategy and we’ll be presenting information on how to find funding and some of the other support services that are available, to WSU faculty across campuses and colleges.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: My name is Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello. I’m a research development specialist in the Office of Research with Advancement and Strategy.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: So I will first, talk about the development services that are offered through, Office of Research. Advancement and Strategy provides services, for finding funding. We also have some internal grant opportunities that you can apply for. We have, a research development toolbox for proposal development. We help support development of your proposals by providing editing, timelines, templates, that kind of thing.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: You can reach out to us, if you need any of those services, we’re happy to help you. And we also provide, faculty training and through these information sessions and through workshops. Support and operations, they host the eREX form, they help with budget development and, proposal submission. They negotiate, accept and review awards and, provide compliance training and put together non-monetary agreements.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: I just want to remind you that, effective this month, the new erects deadline is now 9:00 in the morning, five business days prior to agency deadline. And I’m going to turn it over now to Levi to talk about our research, assurances and compliance.
Levi O’Loughlin: Certainly. I always try to start these off with some terrible dad jokes. So this is my Halloween slash sciency joke for you. I got chased by a skeleton the other day, but when he caught me, just gave me a kiss and a hug. It turns out he’s an exoskeleton. Get it? X-O, Okay. Thank You.
Levi O’Loughlin: I got one smiley face. I appreciate that. That’s probably more kind than the terrible bad joke I just told two smiley faces. So our office is assurance. We like to think we’re more than just compliance, but the majority of what we do is, compliance with fed or state, or even sometimes local expectations. So we oversee, any research involving, biosafety.
Levi O’Loughlin: So anything potentially bio hazardous, any kind of animal. If you want to work with human subjects, funded or not, you know, doing surveys or anything, we want to just protect those participants. If you’re using radioactive materials or radiation producing machines, you would need to contact our office. And then we also do all hazmat shipping for the university.
Levi O’Loughlin: That’s Pullman-centric. If you’re on a different campus or an extension center, we would collaborate with you and help you do those, sometimes other campuses, train shippers, Spokane. Vancouver. But, if you’re at an extension center, we might, have different ways to help you ship something because researchers tend to like the mail of the wide variety of things.
Levi O’Loughlin: And then we can also assist you, if you have foreign nationals working on projects, that there is a foreign national restriction with your grant or funding or, if it’s a controlled technology, that the US government is, limited activity with how that works. So we can help you solve a lot of those things. Our team, we like to think of ourselves as professional problem solvers, are there to assist faculty, solve these interesting problems and stay in compliance so that you don’t get into any kind of, civil or criminal problems.
Levi O’Loughlin: And then we can also, you know, safeguard the research and market. Whenever you publish something, check those boxes and say, we did this ethically. You got, you know, our mice or whatever they are, ethically sourced. If you have questions on any of that, there is that website, ora.wsu.edu, you can go to that. It’s full of all kinds of information, lots of web pages.
Levi O’Loughlin: And then that’ll have links to individuals to help you specifically, if you don’t want to do that, you know, I’d be happy to direct you to the right person if it’s not me. Is that good enough Cheryl, or do you want more detail?
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: Yes. Thank you. No, thank you very much, Levi. And please join Levi for the next session on, compliance issues and and other things that assurances does. I’m going to stop sharing my screen and I’m going to try to leave.
Karen Biggs: Go ahead and leave it as it is, Cheryl. I’ll just…
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: Okay.
Karen Biggs: instead,
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: alright
Karen Biggs: but sorry, I don’t want to jump into, I guess I’ll take over.
Karen Biggs: My name is Karen. I work in the the Commercialization, so I’m on that impact side of things. I am a licensing associate, and my job is to help you guys take the innovate, the insights from your research and turn them into impact in the outside world. Our office includes a number of people like myself, as well as people who are experts in intellectual property that can help with all sorts of questions and answers that you have.
Karen Biggs: Our primary goal is to provide your support, and this comes in the form of understanding what the impact of your research might be, understanding how you want to go about achieving impact in the outside world. We think that, you know, publications and additional forms of grant funding are a fantastic and great ways to produce impact, but they’re not the only way to do so.
Karen Biggs: For example, we also like to look at the way that we’re able to change, standards of clinical practice or the way that we’re able to help take things from engineering and turn them into products in the outside world, or, copyright different curricula and courses that are going to be benefiting students, that are not just at WSU.
Karen Biggs: So, things that we do include providing, gap funding. So we have a commercialization gap fund that is a $50,000 opportunity for funding, to take your technology or your work and bring it to the next level. We’re also, members of the iCorps Northwest hub, so that if you want to participate in the NSF iCorps program, which is a fantastic way to learn customer discovery, we can help you
Karen Biggs: gain access to that. And then intellectual property management and due diligence. So understanding what your invention means, taking care of patents, copyright, trademarks. Once we have intellectual property protection, we can help with marketing and licensing of that, finding the correct partner in the outside world and then finally entrepreneurship training and support. So if entrepreneurship is part of your goals with your research
Karen Biggs: we can help you along that journey as well. If you have any questions for us, you can go to our website, which is commercialization.wsu.edu or contact us through our email, which is commercialization@wsu.edu.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: Did you want to talk about these slides Karen?
Karen Biggs: Sure we can go through really quickly. Yeah. We just believe that, innovation is central to the land grant mission here. So we are helping with that process of translating into, products, programs and partnerships. We can move on to the next one. We measure that in a bunch of different ways, such as the reach, the revenue, additional grant funding.
Karen Biggs: This is an example of CBT Sims that comes out of our College of Nursing. They have been able to produce a simulator that helps people who work in law enforcement to understand their own cognitive biases and then train against those so that they can provide better policing. And that is an example, has trained thousands of police officers and they’ve also been able to use the funding that’s come from that to continue to support their lab so that they now have versions that are specialized for dispatch and for health care providers, for example. Next. And then finally, I wanted to just go really quickly through our, policies because we,
Karen Biggs: specifically have policies that invest in our faculty who decide to become innovators. So this is all set through EP 38 and is available in the faculty manual. But that when finance, revenue comes in associated with an innovation that comes from WSU, 20% off the top goes to the Office of Commercialization. And then the first, $10,000 in revenue that’s generated actually go directly to our innovators themselves.
Karen Biggs: And then after that, it becomes a 50-50 split between the inventors and the university and the college and department. So, we are, as far as universities are concerned, on par with if not more generous than any other university in the country when it comes to our revenue distribution policies for our inventors at our schools. So that is part of WSU’s commitment to continuing to invest in innovation and allowing our faculty to be as innovative as possible.
Karen Biggs: And yeah, historically, we’ve taken a look at this in the form of patents. But we now, take we can go ahead and next slide. We now are taking a much more expansive use of this, including things like surveys, research tools, software curricula, trainings, data and patents. So even if you think that your work is not necessarily going to be resulting in a patent, that doesn’t mean that it is not something that we want to be talking to you about and working with you on.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: Okay. Thank you very much, Karen. I appreciate that. I’m going to stop sharing my screen and turn it over to Emily Brashear in the same unit as I am in the Office of Research to, talk about Pivot and how you can use it to find funding.
Emily Brashear: Thanks for having me today. I am going to share my screen just one second. Hopefully this pops up soon. There we go. So my primary job is to help faculty find funding for faculty grad students and pretty much anybody that comes to me. I don’t really ask what your title or role is, but, so when I do so we use the pivot database.
Emily Brashear: What it is, it’s a giant database that houses funding opportunities that are, that is worldwide. And anybody who has WSU or access, anybody with the WSU email has access to this database. Some of the things you can see is, on here, you’ll be able to see, funding opportunities. You can see profiles if you’re looking for possible collaborations.
Emily Brashear: This is kind of used as a stepping stone just because they, use these. They get this information from scraping the WSU website, conferences. This is a really cool tab that if you or your somebody, maybe a grad student or somebody needs to either present at a conference or, attend a conference to see what’s going on outside your research, because I feel like a lot of people know of the first, you know, maybe about 4 or 5 conferences that happen all the time around their research
Emily Brashear: but this can help branch out because it is worldwide and see what’s happening in their field. The awarded grants tab is not as useful as, our database here at WSU. So if you’re ever looking for, what WSU has received in funding, you can contact the Office of Research Support and Operations or, or one of us in the Office of Research Advancement and Strategy.
Emily Brashear: But this also you can see this from this tab. You can be able to see where the agency is putting their money to other to other, universities. And the news tab, if you have time to read it, has a few short articles available, but not, anything extensive since we don’t pay for that. But the one thing that I do want to highlight on the funding for pivot is what you can do is you can create these searches based on your research.
Emily Brashear: So you’re only receiving funding opportunities based on what you are interested in and not like a general area and what you can do is you can go and you can save these searches, and I can always give you, a brief let me log in real fast to whoa, we’re not going to Authors. Let’s try that again.
Emily Brashear: Sorry. Cancel. What what are what we’re doing or what it’s doing is, It will give you you can create these searches based on your research. And every week that. It’s going to make me sign in every week, it’ll notify you of any opportunities that, pop up that are pertaining to your search and hopefully we end up getting you end up creating a search that enables more funding opportunities to go through.
Emily Brashear: And I just want to show you real quick what that looks like as it comes through. So if you go to your sav-, if I go to my saved searches, you can see I have 19 searches right now. They just range over different things. So, and you depending on what proj- project you’re working on, you can add these little tags to, so you don’t kind of get you don’t get lost in your funding opportunities or why you’re interested in that topic.
Emily Brashear: So I can, definitely work with you individually or in a group setting on how to set these up, these saved searches. You can also track funding opportunities just in case there’s or or funders. So just in case there’s somebody that, or an opportunity that you’re really interested in, you know, this Peabody Award as soon as this comes out, you know that it’s an anticipated date, but they’ll notify me
Emily Brashear: when it does, come forward. So it’s really interest if you’re interested in specific opportunities, it’s good to have them on your tracked list. So anyway, pivot does encompass a lot of, federal, nonprofit, state opportunities. Some private foundations. Doesn’t count everything. So, thankfully, we have the WSU Foundation, which will speak right after me.
Emily Brashear: About, how to access more, foundation opportunities that wouldn’t be in pivot and, but I also do want to highlight we do have some internal opportunities through the Office of Research Advancement and strateg-, strategy to take a look at. There are some that are coming up. So these, seven right here are reoccurring. The RA&10K just happened.
Emily Brashear: But we do have supplemental funds that that we, our office will give to bridge the gap between your research, and the new faculty seed grant’s coming out. The, inspire community engaged research seed grants are coming out. So we have some that are are coming forward soon. So take a look at that if you’re interested in that. And then one other thing that we do in our office is we are in charge of the limited submissions, which I’m not going to find fast enough here we are.
Emily Brashear: So if there are any, if you find any age or agency that’s saying there’s a limitation like the agency can only apply once, or maybe the PI can only apply so many times in a year, we do require that you fill out this cover letter, which is just a notification to us that you’re applying. It’s a placeholder.
Emily Brashear: And then if it becomes a competition, we might ask for more information, but if not, we send you an official letter to move forward in the process. So keep that in mind. And you can find these limited submissions, they are highlighted in the pivot database, with a deadline of the internal deadline. So if it’s something you’re interested in, definitely reach out to our office.
Emily Brashear: Other than that, I think I’ll stop sharing for now. But if you’re interested in looking at the pivot database or learning more about it, reach out to myself or our office, any office in OR and they’ll shoot you towards us. And with that, I’m going to pass it over to the Office of Foundation Relations.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: Thanks, Emily.
Zenna Glaser: Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Zenna and I work in the Office of Foundation Relations. So I’ll give a really brief overview. But what we do is we support faculty, staff and leadership who would like to work with private foundation opportunities. And we work with so many. We have portfolios like hundreds in our portfolios, but the bigger names would be like the Murdoch Trust, The W.M. Keck Foundation, the Washington Research Foundation.
Zenna Glaser: Those are probably familiar to you all. But what we do is we have been working with these foundations for years and years. We have a really strong relationship with some of them. We have a good idea of their like, funding interests and limitations. So the way that we work with the university is if you’re interested in applying to these foundations, please let us know
Zenna Glaser: and we can kind of coordinate your proposal and give you some of that insider information that you might not have otherwise. So next slide, please. Some of the services we provide are identification coordination and research of potential partners. So what that means is if a faculty member emails us and says, hey, I need funding for this initiative, do you have any foundations in your portfolio that might align with my work?
Zenna Glaser: We can kind of look through portfolios and see if we find any good bits. We could help with letter of intent and proposal development. We can help, with RFP process guidance. If you have any questions about how to apply. Again, we have insights with those foundations that we’ve had these longstanding relationships with. We can provide support for site visits and support for reporting and stewardship, as well.
Zenna Glaser: So, that’s kind of a super brief overview of what to what we do. But the main thing is, is that the WSU Foundation is a separate entity from WSU. We have a different tax code. We’re a 501c3. So if you see an RFP that says only a 501c3 is eligible to apply, or only a 501c3 can receive this award, please loop us in.
Zenna Glaser: We are eligible to apply through the foundation, and we can help you with your proposal and make sure you’re on the strongest foot when you’re applying. So that’s my super brief schpeel, but we do have more information on our website, and we also have an FAQ if you have any questions.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: Thank you very much. I’m going to stop sharing my screen again and let, our Modernization team take over, sharing their information.
Joel Bifford: Okay? And just make sure that I am sharing my screen. All right. Thanks. Yeah, I, one of the business analysts, with modernization, I do actually have, one slide to share for, sponsored program services, kind of before kind of get into the monetization side, but basically, sponsored program services, kind of what you’re looking the main, accounting group at WSU, once you’ve actually been awarded grant funds.
Joel Bifford: And so they’re going to be, responsible for, any of the accounting, that’s taking place on, any sponsored activity. And you know, that that’s going to include, award set ups, all of the invoicing, helping with the reporting, payments, getting your awards closed out and then some of the subrecipient monitoring. So with being on, modernization,
Joel Bifford: We do work a lot with sponsored programs. You know, we’re what we’re doing is basically, kind of that support side of any of the business systems at WSU, mainly being, Workday. And then we do have a, grants team that consists of three people, Ben Howard, Ty Simonsson and myself.
Levi O’Loughlin: And we’re part of the larger, finance group for Modernization, but, for mod grants, what we’re really trying to do is make sure that the system is, working, you know, for the end, for the end users and always looking at ways that we can, make it better, make it more usable. More user friendly.
Joel Bifford: One of the big things that came out of that, that is probably really impactful for you as, faculty and being principal investigators eventually is the, principal investigator, dashboard. That has been, live, in workday since about mid 2024. But really what that what how that was developed was, you know, going out to the community understanding, really what you guys wanted, as PIs to be able to see in workday, make it a little bit less cumbersome, more user friendly.
Joel Bifford: So it’s kind of a one stop shop, that really empowers, the faculty to kind of get the information, that they want. And I would say, you know, you are going to have a grant and administrators, your grant manager assignment in your awards that’s going they’re always going to be very helpful. But this kind of gives you the opportunity to kind of go out in Workday and know where to find some information
Joel Bifford: you know, on your, on your own, and, you know, it has a few different worklets. It, allows you to see available balances on your grants accounts, but also your program and gifts. See all the workers that are paid on any of your accounts? There’s a ability for your grant admins to kind of see the same information that you’re seeing.
Joel Bifford: So it kind of can help with answering questions. But it’s just a good place, to go for all that information within workday. And it usually should be available, in your top apps. You can see there the, dashboard icon. That’s the easiest way to find it. If it doesn’t happen to be there, you can always add it to your apps and workday, or search for it in the top, search bar.
Joel Bifford: And I think we’re going to have an opportunity to go in one of these sessions, later to go into more depth. But here there are some, reference material. If you want to kind of go in there and start looking at it, it should be pretty, straightforward. But again, you can work with your grant admins to kind of help.
Joel Bifford: They’ll kind of help you navigate that stuff. As well.
Joel Bifford: And yeah, I think that’s
Joel Bifford: all I have to share.
Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello: Thanks very much, Joel. And, again, thanks to, Levi, Karen and Zenna for, presenting their information.