Research NewsletterIssue: ORN-2022-02

DOE Announces $420 Million to Advance Clean Energy Breakthroughs at Energy Research Centers

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced a $420 million funding opportunity for DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC). This funding will advance climate solutions through early-stage research on clean energy technology, advanced and low-carbon manufacturing, and quantum information science. Breakthroughs in basic research will be key to creating the climate solutions that will help achieve President Biden’s goal of a zero-emission economy by 2050.  The EFRC program brings together diverse teams of scientists across disciplines and institutions – including universities, national laboratories, industry, and nonprofits – solely focused on solving complex problems in early-stage research and accelerating advances in the most challenging areas of materials sciences, chemical sciences, geosciences, and biosciences. Since the program’s introduction in 2009, there have been 88 EFRCs across 41 states, with 41 currently active. The funding opportunity is sponsored by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences within the Department’s Office of Science and can be found here.

­­­­­­­­­­­________________________________

NAI-NJIT Chapter Workshop

Sustainable Societies: Global Healthcare

Innovations to Global Solutions

In Conjunction with

President’s Forum

and

NJIT 2022 Research Institutes, Centers and Laboratory Showcase

February 21, 2022; 9.00 AM – 2.00 PM

Ballroom A/B and Gallery, Campus Center, NJIT

Abstract: As the world continues to evolve with increasing population and life expectancy along with urbanization and socio-economic inequalities, the global community is now facing a critical grand challenge of quality healthcare at affordable cost. According to the data published by World Health Organization (WHO), top global causes of death, in order of total number of lives lost but not including pandemic outbreaks, are associated with three broad topics: cardiovascular (ischemic heart disease, stroke), respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infections) and neonatal conditions.

Though the recent technological and pharmaceutical advances in healthcare have enabled tremendous improvements in diagnosis, treatment and therapeutic intervention of critical diseases, healthcare remains one of the most critical challenges in communicable and non-communicable diseases due to barriers to accessibility and continuously rising costs directly impacting the sustainability of the global society, specifically in under-resourced as well as elderly communities in both developing and developed countries.

The Point-of-Care (POC) technologies have a potential to provide global healthcare at affordable costs towards personalized, preventive and precision medicine. The potential benefits of POC technologies in providing sustainable healthcare solutions for managing communicable as well as non-communicable diseases globally are becoming increasingly evident. The POC innovations and technologies can provide essential tools in delivering effective healthcare in public health emergencies, disaster situations, and under-resourced environments.

The workshop will provide an open forum to discuss innovative global solutions to address the healthcare grand challenge through preventive, personalized and precision medicine exploring the potential contributions of Point-of-Care technologies for communicable as well as non-communicable diseases.  The workshop will feature keynote talks and panel discussions by leaders from all stakeholder groups representing academic, industry, healthcare, and regulatory sectors to discuss potential pathways and collaborative synergies towards sustainable societies with affordable quality healthcare.

Panel-1 will focus on challenges associated with global healthcare for public health emergencies such as COVID-19 pandemic as well as critical non-communicable diseases. Lessons learned from the recent NIH’s successful RADx initiative in developing and accelerating the use of POC testing technologies for timely intervention and clinical management of COVID-19 pandemic will be discussed. The panel will also explore how challenges the US encounters managing patients across systems, spending limited resources effectively, and setting and meeting regulatory requirements become even more complex in global healthcare. Panel-2 will focus on technology innovation, translation, and scalability of innovative solutions to diverse environments and societies, each with unique care delivery models and opportunities. In addition, select research and development technologies in critical global healthcare applications will be explored.    

Program Agenda

8.30 AM – 9.00 AM:  Registration and Electronic PPT Poster Set-up

9.00 AM – 10.00 AM: NJIT Research Institutes, Centers and Laboratories Showcase: Electronic Poster  Session-1

10.00 AM – 10.05 AM: Welcome Remarks:

                                       Atam Dhawan, Senior Vice Provost for Research, NJIT

                                      Joel Bloom, President, NJIT

                                       Fadi Deek, Provost and Senior Executive Vice President, NJIT

10.05 AM – 10.10 AM: Program Agenda and Introduction to the Distinguished Speaker

                                       Atam Dhawan, Senior Vice Provost for Research, NJIT

10.10 AM – 10.50 AM:  Keynote Presentation: Opportunities in Engineering Medicine to Advance Global Healthcare

                                      Distinguished Speaker: Roderic Pettigrew, PhD, MD

                                       Chief Executive Officer of Engineering Health and Executive Dean Intercollegiate School of Engineering Medicine at Texas A&M University, Former Founding Director, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health (NIH)

10.50 AM–11.30 AM: Distinguished Panel Discussion I: Sustainable Societies: Global Healthcare Challenges

Moderator:

Arunan Skandarajah, PhD

Presidential Innovation Fellow at FDA

Panelists:

Steven Schachter, MD

CTO, CIMIT

Jo Carol Hiatt, MD, MBA, FACS

Vice President, Health Economics and Patient Value, Medical Device Innovation Consortium

Yukari C. Manabe, MD

Associate Director of Global Health Research and Innovation, Professor of Medicine, JHU

11.30 AM–12.10 PM:    Distinguished Panel Discussion II: Sustainable societies: Global Healthcare Innovations

Moderator:

Reynold A. Panettieri, Jr., MD

Vice Chancellor for Translational Medicine and Science

Director, Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science

Professor of Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School                

Panelists:

Caroline Mbindyo

CEO, Amref Health Innovations

Treena Arinzeh, PhD

Distinguished Professor, NJIT

George F. Heinrich, MD

Vice Chair and CEO, Foundation Venture Capital Group, New Jersey Health Foundation

12.10 PM – 12.30 PM: Concluding Remarks

                                     Distinguished Speaker: Amadou Sall, PhD

                                     CEO of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal 

12.30 PM – 1.00 PM: Lunch and Networking Session

1.00 PM – 2.00 PM:   NJIT Research Institutes, Centers and Laboratories Showcase: Electronic Poster Session-2

NSF: Announcement of Upcoming Topics for the 2022 NSF Convergence Accelerator Solicitation; Signals in the Soil (SitS); Accelerating Innovations in Biomanufacturing Approaches through Collaboration Between NSF and the DOE BETO funded Agile BioFoundry (NSF-DOE/ABF Collaboration); EHR Core Research: Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER); Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE): Use-Inspired Research Challenges on Climate Change and Clean Energy); Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER); Leading Culture Change Through Professional Societies of Biology (BIO-LEAPS); Division of Environmental Biology (core programs) (DEB); Hydrologic Sciences (HS); NSF/CASIS Collaboration on Transport Phenomena Research on the International Space Station (ISS) to Benefit Life on Earth; NSF Convergence Accelerator 2022 Joint NSF/DOD Phases 1 and 2 for Track G: Securely Operating Through 5G Infrastructure; Special Guidelines for Submitting Collaborative Proposals under National Science Foundation and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Collaborative Opportunities in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Science

NIH: High-End Instrumentation (HEI) Grant Program (S10); Shared Instrumentation Grant (SIG) Program (S10); Biomedical Research Facilities (C06); Research on Current Topics in Alzheimer's Disease and Its Related Dementias (R21); Supporting Talented Early Career Researchers in Genomics (R01), BRAIN Initiative-Related Research Education: Short Courses (R25)

Department of Defense/US Army/DARPA/ONR: Science & Technology for Advanced Manufacturing Projects (STAMP); Strategic Technology Office (STO) Office-wide; Information Innovation Office (I2O) Office-Wide; Long Range Broad Agency Announcement for Navy and Marine Corps Science and Technology; MEDICAL COUNTERMEASURE SYSTEMS (MCS) BAA

Department of Transportation: FY 2021 Competitive Funding Opportunity: Enhancing Mobility Innovation

Department of Agriculture: Announcement for Program Funding for NRCS’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP); Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research Grants Program

Department of Labor: Apprenticeship Building America (ABA) Grant Program

Department of Commerce/EDA:  Precision Measurement Grant Program (PMGP); Environmental Literacy Program; FY2021 to FY2023 NOAA Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)

EPA: Enhanced Air Quality Monitoring for Communities

Department of Energy: Energy Frontier Research Centers; Biosystems Design to Enable Safe Production of Next-Generation Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biomaterials; High-Energy-Density Plasma Laboratory Science; Fiscal Year 2022 Distinguished Early Career Program; SciDAC: Partnerships in Earth System Model Development

NASA: ROSES 2021: Astrophysics Pioneers; ROSES: Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology; ROSES 2021: Land-Cover/Land-Use Change:SARI Synthesis

National Endowment of Humanities: Fellowships; Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities; Institutes for Higher Education Faculty

Private Foundations: L'Oréal: L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Fellowships program

Guidance for U.S. Scientific Research Security That Preserves International Collaboration: The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released  guidance to all federal research agencies on how to implement the requirements in National Security Presidential Memorandum 33 (NSPM-33). The complete implementation guidance is posted on the website https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/010422-NSPM-33-Implementation-Guidance.pdf A copy of this guidance document is attached for your quick reference.  The following blog is posted on the CRA (Computing Research Association) website https://cra.org/govaffairs/blog/2022/01/ostp-research-security-guidance/  

            "An on-going concern with efforts to crack down on this “research security” problem is that it could lead to singling out people of specific ethnicities, particular those of Chinese descent. OSTP and the National Science and Technology Council were as concerned about not fueling prejudice and xenophobia as they were about protecting research. In fact, the “General Implementation Guidance” (page 1) states that research agencies need to engage with the research community throughout their implementation process, as well as to adopt measures that are “risk-based,” while avoiding retroactive application of measures. While this appears to be a good first step, there is still much work to be do, most significantly each research agency will need to put out their specific policies.

_____________________

Report Outlines How Government Contact Centers of Tomorrow Should Operate: To meet growing customer demands, government contact centers of the future must shift dramatically to the digital age and away from today’s brick-and-mortar counterparts. So says a Deloitte Center for Government Insights report released Jan. 12, which recommends the government consider seven strategies to significantly improve the contact center experience millions of Americans partake in when they inquire about benefits, have questions about taxes or engage with federal agencies about the numerous services they provide. Contact centers are an integral part of the federal customer experience—an area of recent focus by President Joe Biden, who issued an executive order in December directing agencies to take a people-centric approach to providing services. Despite progress in customer experience metrics in recent years, federal agencies routinely rank behind other industries in customer experience performance, and legacy technology challenges were magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the report. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

_____________________

Energy Launches New Program To Overhaul the U.S. Electrical Grid: The Department of Energy announced the launch of a new initiative Wednesday that focuses on upgrading the U.S.’ electrical grid in support of a more sustainable energy economy.  The program, dubbed the Building a Better Grid Initiative, takes cues from President Joe Biden’s plans to overhaul the country’s infrastructure in support of a nationwide transition to clean electricity by 2035. “The foundation of our climate and clean energy goals is a safe, reliable, and resilient electric grid that is planned hand-in-hand with community partners and industry stakeholders,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. “DOE’s new Building a Better Grid initiative is a job booster spurred by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and collaboration with communities to upgrade the nation’s grid, connect more Americans to clean electricity and broadband, and reliably move clean energy to where it’s needed most.” Detailed in the corresponding notice of intent are the potential cost benefits of moving to a modernized and sustainable electrical grid. Officials state that clean energy solutions are becoming the cheapest alternative across the country, yet inaccessible for many parts of the country. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

Question:  I need to change my budget - Do I need to change it in Streamlyne?

Answer:  You can change your budget at any point before submitting the proposal into workflow approval. For more information, please contact your college ambassador, or see New User Manual posted on the Research website

http://www.njit.edu/research/sites/research/files/StreamlyneNewUserManualCommonElements.pdf ).

More FAQs on Streamlyne: Please visit http://www.njit.edu/research/streamlyne/