Hello colleagues! We are so glad to see the campus alive with Fall activity. We love the bustling students, energized faculty, marching band practices, football games, Laker Con, Chalk Art Symposium, and so much more. What is your favorite part of Fall?

New Website

Along with our new name comes a new look. We have upgraded our website to the new CMS 5 platform. If you have links to the old CSCE website in any of your materials, please double check that they are not broken and/or relink to the Faculty Research and Innovation (FRIC) website at www.gvsu.edu/research

Updates on FRIC Grants

• Faculty Travel Support Grant: this application has closed for the second quarter. It will reopen on November 15th for third quarter travel. We have expanded the Dissemination Grant to include any travel related to your research and creative practice. It is now called the Faculty Travel Support Grant. Faculty may apply for one of these $600 grants per fiscal year.

• Momentum Fund: we have re-imagined the Mini Grant and are calling it the Momentum Fund. This is a more competitive grant than the Mini was, but the award has been raised to $2,000! Faculty may apply for one per fiscal year. Once our MyApps Application is ready, we will accept 1st and 2nd Quarter applications for 2 weeks. You may preview the application by downloading the PDF.

We are also working on a change to the Catalyst Grant, which will be called the Seed Grant. It will still offer up to $5,000 for project support, and be reviewed by the Faculty Research and Development Committee. The focus will be more on the "seed" aspect. More information will be coming before the first deadline for this grant. The Seed Grant and the Collaborative Grant will be on the same funding cycles: two rounds per academic year with deadlines on December 15th and March 1st.

Faculty Fellowship Opportunities

CAORC Overseas Faculty Seminars: Apply by September 4 (Senegal), September 15 (Mexico), November 20 (Cambodia)

2027-28 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship: Apply by September 10

Questions? Contact Brenda Tooley, Director of the Frederik Meijer Office of Fellowships.

Travel to Hong Kong

If you will be traveling to Hong Kong (including any layovers), please be aware that the Hong Kong government has enacted a recent law that makes it a criminal offense to refuse to provide the Hong Kong police the passwords or decryption assistance to access all personal electronic devices (including cellphones and laptops) if requested. As a reminder, please contact the Office of Research Compliance and Integrity if you will be traveling internationally on behalf of GVSU and/or with GVSU equipment. The ORCI will review your trip for any potential export control restrictions.

Classroom Presentations

The ORCI is currently scheduling classroom presentations for the Fall semester. If you are interested in having a representative from the ORCI serve as a guest presenter in your classroom to discuss research ethics/compliance topics (i.e., human subjects research, responsible conduct of research, etc.), please contact the ORCI at rci@gvsu.edu. We will try to accommodate as many requests as possible.

Amazon MTurk Closure

If you are a researcher who uses the MTurk platform, please be aware that Amazon is ending the service effective September 30, 2026. Before that date, please ensure you have completed data collection and removed all data from the system, and make certain that all research participants have received compensation for their study involvement. Please contact the ORCI if you have any questions about how this change might impact your research study and your Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocol.

Introducing Our New Grants Associate

We’re very excited to introduce the newest member of our team in the Office of Sponsored Programs: Tietricha Thomas, our new grants associate! She brings experience in nonprofit leadership, grant development, program design, and behavioral science, with a background developing and supporting externally funded community-based initiatives. Prior to joining GVSU, she co-founded and led a Michigan nonprofit organization focused on youth development, education, health, and community programming. Tietricha earned a Master of Liberal Arts in Psychology and a Graduate Certificate in Human Behavior from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from Western Michigan University.

New Grants and Contracts Contacts

With our changing team, we’ve also updated who works with which GVSU units, aiming to balance our workload, match up specialties and skillsets, and honor the strong relationships built in the past. You can check out our Grants & Contracts Specialist Directory to see if you’ve got a new contact, or just reach out and we’ll direct you. This is a work-in-progress: more changes may come, and we might temporarily assign you to a new specialist during particularly busy times, so we can make sure your submissions get the care they need.

We Have “Pivoted” to SPIN

OSP has upgraded our searchable grants database subscription from Pivot-RP to infoEd’s SPIN. This database offers a wide variety of federal, non-federal, and private funding opportunities for any discipline. Anyone with an @gvsu.edu email address can access SPIN, and if you create an account and profile, you can save search criteria, track and share opportunities, and receive updates on new funding opportunities. Please note: creating an account will prompt our office to approve you, so there may be a slight wait until that step is completed. We’re working on a user guide, and we’ll share that when it’s ready!

Research Matters Trainings

The Research Matters team is excited to offer in-person versions of our training modules, in Fall 2026, upon request. Reach out to osp@gvsu.edu if you’re interested. We’re hoping to get groups of at least 10 attendees together when we ‘go on the road,’ so if your unit is interested, let us know! The Research Matters modules are also available as recorded sessions on our website, and as always, feel free to reach out to your Grants and Contracts Specialist whenever you have a proposal on your horizon.

OneAegis Updates

We are hard at work improving our processes with an aim of more clarity, efficiency, and communication. With a big thank you to Ben Vesper of RCI, we are happy to share that a major update to the OSP New Proposal Submission Form in OneAegis has just been published – this is primarily about back-end function but if you run into any issues, please reach out to osp@gvsu.edu and we’ll address them. We already have a wish list going for the next round!