Research NewsletterIssue: ORN-2025-05

InfoReady – An Online Portal Available at NJIT

We are pleased to announce that a web-based portal InfoReady is now available to NJIT research community. InfoReady is a part of the digital transformation initiative in the Office of Research aligned with the NJIT 2030 strategic plan contributing to improve service delivery functions and process efficiency. 

InfoReady is a web-based platform used in research settings to streamline the process of managing internal funding applications, review processes, and award decisions, essentially acting as a centralized hub for researchers to access and apply for various limited submission funding opportunities and institutional seed grants, all while automating workflows and eliminating the need for multiple spreadsheets and emails. 

InfoReady allows to convert nearly any form, document, or administrative request into a highly efficient digital process with user-friendly workflow tools that allow us to define, track, and oversee every step of a process. It caters specifically to academic and research institutions and provides an approach to meeting the needs of higher education that allows for all the tasks and requests to be accessed and managed from anywhere at any time.

The Office of Research has started using it as a single platform to submit proposals, manage reviews, and track decisions for institutional seed grants and limited funding opportunities proposals (see here).  We anticipate that its use will be extended to streamlining and managing other administrative operations over time.

Any questions regarding the use of InfoReady should be directed to Shawn Chester, Associate Vice Provost for Research Collaborations and Partnerships at shawn.chester@njit.edu.

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Updates on the Impact of Federal Executive Orders on Federally Funded Research Grants and Contracts

We are continuing to monitor the situation and will keep you informed of further developments as we learn of them and determine their impact on NJIT and its research community. Please visit our webpage here for the most recent updates on the Impact of Federal Executive Orders on Federally Funded Research Grants and Contracts.

NSF Implementation of Recent Executive Orders

NSF: Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI); Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable Open Science (FAIROS); Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC)

NIH: Investigator Gateway Awards for Collaborative T1D Research (R03); NIA Postdoctoral Fellowship Award to Promote Broad Participation in Translational Research for AD/ADRD (F32); T32 Training Program to Promote Broad Participation (T32)

Department of Defense/US Army/DARPA/ONR: AFRL FY25 Compositional Optimization, Dynamical Systems and Control (CODAC) UNIVERSITY CENTER OF EXCELLENCE; ERDC Broad Agency Announcement

Department of Energy: 2025 Exploratory Research for Extreme-Scale Science; Early Career Research Program; High-Energy-Density Laboratory Plasma Science

OpenAI brings its large language models to Energy’s national labs: OpenAI announced on Thursday that it signed an agreement with all 17 of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories to provide them with access to its reasoning large language models to support breakthrough discoveries for a bevy of applications.  “Sharing our technology with the nation’s top scientists aligns with our mission of building [artificial generative intelligence] to benefit humanity, and we believe the U.S. government is a critical partner to achieve this goal,” the announcement said. 

Target focus areas for the scientists looking to leverage OpenAI’s models include accelerating fundamental scientific research, enhancing cybersecurity for the U.S. power grid, disease prevention research, energy research, threat detection, nuclear security and high-energy physics research.

On the hardware side, Microsoft was listed as the “preferred partner” for compute infrastructure that can process the volumes of data OpenAI’s models demand.  This enhanced agreement follows OpenAI’s initial partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. OpenAI’s press release stated that access to its models will be conditioned on a “careful and selective review of use cases and consultations on AI safety” from OpenAI employees with security clearances. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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Breakneck pace of executive orders and lagging, unclear guidance leave contractors guessing: The breathless pace at which the Trump administration has issued new executive orders, paused contract and grants spending and potentially upended the federal workforce has left government contractors largely waiting to see if their programs are moving forward, without a lot of answers from agency officials.

Professional Services Council President and CEO David Berteau said on a media call Wednesday that the contracting trade association has been keeping track of the torrent of overlapping executive orders that have emerged from the White House over the past week, but because they are applied in expansive and intersecting ways, contractors aren’t sure where they stand amid policy pronouncements, reversals and clarifications.  The speed, and often lack of specificity, with which the Trump administration has paused federal spending has recently rippled uncertainty throughout the government and beyond, such as when the White House unilaterally halted federal grants, loans and assistance programs Tuesday, only later clarifying that it the freeze did not apply to programs providing direct assistance to individuals, such as Social Security and Medicare.  A federal judge later temporarily halted the order minutes before it was supposed to take effect and the Office of Management and Budget later rescinded it on Wednesday. More information is posted on the NextGov website.