The Office of the Vice President for Research is pleased to host the workshop Planning & Writing Successful NSF CAREER Proposals, presented by Dr. Peg Atkisson and Dr. Amanda Welch of Atkisson Training Group, LLC.

This webinar will be presented the morning of Tuesday, February 9th, 2023 from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm.

This workshop is ONLY open to WSU faculty and current postdoctoral and graduate trainees. NOMINATION AND REGISTRATION ARE REQUIRED. Since the OVPR is covering the costs for the seminar, registrants must be nominated by a university official:

• Department chair for faculty members

• Faculty researcher for postdoctoral fellows

• Graduate advisor for graduate students

Provide the name and email of your nominating official at the time of registration for verification.
To register, click on the RSVP button above using your WSU email address or AccessID – and make sure it is correct! You will be sent a link to the Webinar training session shortly before the event.

Content of the Webinar

An NSF Career award application is more than an NSF standard grant with an education plan added in. Highly competitive proposals integrate the research and education plans. In this seminar we will talk about both why and how to create a plan that results in a competitive proposal. The workshop is a four-hour session with breaks every hour, and combines lecture format with hands-on activities, thoroughly covering all parts of the NSF Career Award Proposal. Attendees can expect to gain understanding of the requirements and nuances of an NSF Career application and the ability to connect proposal elements to tell your story in a cohesive manner.

M. S. (Peg) AtKisson, Ph.D., earned her degree in neuroscience from Tufts University in 2001, working in cell biology and cancer biology as well. After completing her degree, she consulted for Cogniscent, Inc., on nanotechnology applications of short DNA sequences as chemical sensors. She began her research development career as a contract grant writer, with clients including the Association for Computing Machines, Wake Forest University, Hunter College, Tufts University among others. Tufts created a position for her, where she subsequently created and fully staffed one of the earliest formal research development offices. By the time she departed from the position of director of proposal development, she and her team had been involved in bringing in over $140,000,000 in funded grants. Funders ranged from NIH, NSF, and USAID to the W. M. Keck Foundation. Most of these successful high-value proposals supported research centers and infrastructure. She also provided training for faculty and post-doctoral fellows in grant writing.

Since 2008 she has presented an average of 30 seminars per year, customized for many different funders, covering bench and social science as well as arts & humanities. She worked directly with over 200 individual researchers on proposals ranging from materials physics to history, coaching investigators through the grant-writing process to leave each faculty member with a new skill set to be applied to every proposal going forward.

In January 2017 she established the AtKisson Training Group to expand support for faculty research development beyond grant writing--placing the grant proposal in the context of the individual scholar's larger research enterprise and career trajectory. Dr. AtKisson is a highly acclaimed public speaker with a track record of helping faculty improve their competitiveness for funding.

For more information about this event, please contact Mary Serowik at mserowik@wayne.edu.