Get the Grant: Free Workshop Presented by Successful U of A Grant Writers

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The J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation will host a free workshop for the University of Arkansas community dedicated to the art of nationally competitive grant writing.

The workshop, "Tips from Successful Grant Writers," will be from 3 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4, in Old Main room 523.

"Tips from Successful Grant Writers" will feature scholars from Fulbright College with extensive experience in garnering federal support for their research. The panel's conversation will be particularly relevant to science, engineering, agriculture and nursing as the panel will be talking about the process of writing for their readers—the reviewers.

"We are bringing together three fantastic researchers who are committed to interdisciplinary team-building in the natural sciences," said Jeannine Durdik, associate dean of Fulbright College. "They all have excellent insight on how to navigate the complex world of applying to federal agencies."

The workshop is designed to benefit faculty at every level — from recent graduates to advanced researchers.

The panel will showcase faculty members Michael Lehmann with the Department of Biological Sciences, Claire Terhune with the Department of Anthropology and Woody Shew with the Department of Physics.

To register, contact Debbie Power at dlpower@uark.edu or 479-575-3784 no later than 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 20. Seating is limited to 40 participants, on a first come first served basis.

PRESENTERS

Michael Lehmann is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences of Fulbright College. He has received continuous funding for his research since 2007 from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. His projects are single-investigator endeavors that have brought almost $2 million of extramural funds to the university. He has been a reviewer for the NSF for many years, and he is a member of an NIH review panel. In his research, he addresses questions of animal development, growth and metabolism using a genetic model organism, Drosophila melanogaster. Although his research could be categorized as "biomedical," his success with the NSF argues that being "biomedical" should not be a reason to avoid this agency as a potential funding source.

Lehmann received a doctorate in natural sciences from the Philipps University in Marburg, Germany in 1988. He worked for about a decade as a postdoc and at the assistant professor level at the Free University Berlin, before he came to the U.S. to work as a visiting scientist in an HHMI lab at the Eccles Institute of Human Genetics in Salt Lake City. He joined the University of Arkansas as an associate professor in August 2002.

Claire Terhune is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on the evolution of craniofacial shape in primates and humans, and the biomechanics of the masticatory apparatus. She also conducts paleoanthropological field research in Eastern Europe that is focused on examining dispersals of early humans out of Africa and into Europe.

She has successfully competed for nearly $1 million in research funding, including grants from the National Science Foundation and the Leakey Foundation. She has served as an ad hoc grant reviewer for multiple agencies and as a panelist for the National Science Foundation.

Terhune earned a Bachelor of Science in anthropology and a Bachelor of Arts in biology from the College of Charleston, and her masters and doctorate degrees in anthropology from Arizona State University. She spent nearly five years as a postdoctoral researcher and then faculty member in the School of Medicine at Duke University. She joined the University of Arkansas in January 2014.

Woodrow "Woody" Shew is an associate professor in the Department of Physics.  His research is a hybrid of neuroscience and physics, combining laboratory measurements from rodent brains together with computer models of brains. His research is primarily addressing basic questions about how healthy cerebral cortex works, but more recently has begun working with animal models of autism.

Since joining the U of A in January 2012, Shew has obtained more than $1 million in research funding. His funding sources include the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and other non-federal institutes. The majority of this funding was for collaborative projects between his research group and others at U of A and outside U of A. He has served on a review panel for NSF.

Shew earned a B.A. in physics from The College of Wooster in 1998 and a Ph.D. in physics from University of Maryland in 2004. After that, he did one postdoc studying physics of fluid dynamics in France at Ecole Normal Superieure de Lyon.  Then, in 2006, he took a sharp turn away from traditional physics and into neuroscience research for his second, rather long postdoc at the National Institutes of Health.

MODERATOR

Jeannine Durdik, associate dean in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has developed an international reputation in the field of immunology and genomic stability, which has received federal funding of about $4.4 million. Funding sources include the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, United States Department of Agriculture, American Cancer Society and the March of Dimes. She has also served on review panels at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

She received a doctorate in biological sciences from Johns Hopkins University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington and at Brandeis before joining as faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School. She came to the University of Arkansas in 1994.