
Strategic Research Development
EVENTS & WORKSHOPS
2024-2025
EVENTS
2025 NSF CAREER Award Workshop
Friday, February 7, 2025, 9-11am
Tufts OVPR is sponsoring a 2-hour online NSF CAREER Awards workshop that will focus on the specific requirements for a CAREER proposal and tips for developing a compelling education plan. Led by Lucy Deckard, President and Founder of Academic Research Funding Strategies, LLC, this workshop will provide time for hands-on exercises to jumpstart your writing. All participants will be eligible for a consultation with OVPR’s Strategic Research Development team about their proposal, and those working on resubmissions for an NSF CAREER will be able to request a one-on-one consultation with Lucy and her team. Learn more about Lucy Deckard. Please register here. If you are considering a CAREER award for the July 2025 deadline, please reach out here.
Arts and Society: Dialogues
Friday, April 4, 2025, 10-3pm at the SMFA
Tufts’ School of the Museum of Fine Arts is partnering with the OVPR and the office of Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) to host a spring event that highlights creative and wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversations across the arts and contemporary society. After welcoming keynote speaker Daniela Rivera, programming will include dedicated ‘Provocations and Conversations’ gatherings, idea-driven panels, demonstrations, exhibits, and student-led work to foster new connections between faculty across all campuses. Open to the entire Tufts community. See more information here.
Funding Your Research – How to Get Started
Friday, April 25, 2025, 9-11am
Lucy Deckard, founder and president of Academic Research Funding Strategies, LLC, will lead a 2-hour online proposal development workshop for early career faculty who are new to pursuing grant funding to support their research and scholarship. The workshop will cover strategies for developing a research agenda, understanding funding agencies, identifying and analyzing funding opportunities, creating a funding plan, and recruiting mentors and collaborators. This workshop is open to investigators from all fields, and participants will be provided with materials and resources, including example sections of successful proposals.
RECENT EVENTS
Team Science Summit: Climate and Health
Friday, November 8th, 2024
Understanding and responding to the complex threats to health posed by climate change calls for collaboration across campuses and communities. Tufts University Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) developed this opportunity for members of their academic and clinical communities to learn about ongoing and emerging work in multiple fields of research and practice. Speaker sessions focused broadly on Impact of Climate on Emerging Infectious Disease, Leveraging Multidisciplinary Innovation to Address Climate and Health, Building Resilience in the Face of Climate Change. See the full agenda here.
WORKSHOPS
Strategic Research Development staff offer programming periodically that is tailored to the research funding, development, and grant-seeking needs of Tufts faculty, researchers, and students as need arises. Our workshops are designed to address specific needs from crafting compelling narratives to meet a funder’s requirements, to large-scale team science collaboration planning or understanding the landscape of funding agency opportunities. Our programs draw on expertise from across the research funding development spectrum, including through strategic collaborations with Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) or other area experts. We are currently evaluating the future workshop schedule.
Writing your ‘Page One’: Kickstarting a Compelling Grant Proposal
Successful proposals open with a compelling and focused statement that communicates the essentials of your project: we call this the ‘Page One’ and the workshop provides both strategies and review for developing your own draft-in-progress. This section may be called different things - Specific Aims, Executive Summary, or Overview and Objectives, for example – but all need to accomplish the same goals: to capture the interest of your reviewers by providing a clear and compelling summary of what you are asking the agency to fund and why they should fund it.
This programming offers writing strategies, best practices, and resources for getting to the finish line for applicants interested in this prestigious teacher-scholar award.
This workshop series builds on team science fundamentals to provide an evidence-based framework for developing cohesive teams and strategies: designed in partnership with the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).
Tufts Researchers Discuss Team Science
Single-Session Workshops
Our single-session workshops are designed to focus on specific topics depending on the researchers’ needs, from general grantsmanship best practices, strategies for finding funding, and writing for proposals, to a focus on a particular conceptual proposal challenge.