22 USCTIMES
BIGGRANT HUNTING
SPONSORED AWARDS MANAGEMENT DIRECTOR TOMMY COGGINS TALKS FACULTY RESEARCH FUNDING
Q&A BY MEGAN SEXTON
Big ideas don’t come cheap. Equipment, travel, support personnel — as faculty know all too well, even the most promising research project won’t get far without funding. Enter the Office of Sponsored Award Management (SAM), which assists with the very first steps of identifying funding sources. “If you look at any process, the first thing is to know where the money is, and then figure out, ‘How do I get it?’” says Tommy Coggins, director of SAM. And Coggins knows how tricky that can be, particularly for new investigators. When he started working in SAM office in 1980, about one in four grant applications from researchers around the country was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Now, thanks to a shrinking pool of federal money and more researchers competing for those dollars, the success rate for an NIH grant application is one in 12 to 15. But that doesn’t mean your dreams need to die on the drawing board. USC’s faculty have set a new record for sponsored award funding each of the last three years, garnering $253.6 million for research, training and service in fiscal year 2017. USC Times talked to Coggins about the role his office plays in assisting faculty members searching for funding and how faculty can improve their chances of bringing in big bucks. How does your office help faculty looking for research funding?
It’s a matter of determining what funding opportunities match your interest. We have a variety of ways to assist with that, including a database, Pivot, which matches faculty interests with funding sources based on keywords. Pivot also allows faculty members to match up with other faculty members on campus. Within our Office of Research Development (ORD), we have
staff available to assist with the larger-than- normal projects, multi-disciplinary projects and multi-investigator projects. How do you get the word out about funding sources?
If a faculty member is waiting on our staff to tell them where the money is, they’re probably behind the competition. We believe most of our researchers are well-schooled and savvy about how and where to find funding. Occasionally, there could be a nugget out there that is not well known, and ORD regularly announces these opportunities through a campus-wide Listserv. As agencies, foundations, nonprofit organizations or other sponsors announce programs, we push those out as well. What types of funding are USC faculty members typically looking for?
At USC, and other universities, faculty are looking to match their research interests with those of a federal funding agency. NIH is our largest federal funder followed by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Those are the primary agencies that fund fundamental and basic research. For more applied research, there are the mission-directed agencies like DOD, DOE and NASA. For USC and all research universities, government funding accounts for the vast majority of externally sponsored projects. How do the agencies make those decisions about what to fund?
Federal granting agencies have a pot of money that is allocated for certain programs, including research. Awards are made based on how proposals are scored by expert peer review panels. Each program within an agency issues grants beginning with the proposals with the highest scores. The process continues until the