FACILITIES & OTHER RESOURCES:
RESEARCH
[For the Facilities and Resources document, we have created two versions: one that highlights FAU’s research strengths and resources, and another that provides an overview of FAU’s educational infrastructure (student resources, etc.). This version of the Facilities and Resources document highlights RESEARCH resources.
It is always best to highlight first the resources that are specifically available to the project. So, for your proposed project, at the beginning of this document, include the following: any resources that are specifically available to perform the project (descriptions of your lab space, equipment within the lab, technical support for the equipment, etc.). For these resources, discuss their capacities, pertinent capabilities, relative proximity and extent of availability to the project.
After you have discussed the resources that are specifically available to your project, you may want to add some information on other aspects of the intellectual and physical environment at FAU. As such, we’ve included paragraphs below that may help you in crafting that information. If your proposal involves several colleges at FAU, then you can copy and paste those paragraphs below that would help to provide information on your collaborators’ colleges. General information about FAU is also included. Feel free to adapt/edit as necessary, making sure to adhere to the page limits and other formatting requirements of your agency guidelines.
At the end of the document, you will need to add information about facilities and resources available at any other performance sites involved in the project. Also, Early Stage Investigators should describe institutional support for new investigators (for NIH projects, consult the SF 424 R&R Application Guide, which provides instructions for preparing and submitting applications, for additional requirements)].
FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY - OVERVIEW
Florida Atlantic University is categorized as a “High Research Activity” institution according to The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. In fiscal year 2015, the university received $35 million in grant award funding. As part of its ten-year Strategic Plan (2015 – 2025), the university outlined four “pillars” of research strength: healthy aging; neuroscience; ocean science and engineering/environmental science; and sensing and smart systems. These pillars comprise areas of focus that will guide future institutional goals and strategic actions, and they are closely related to FAU’s existing regional and national strengths, including our coastal location, diverse population, and neighboring research institutions.
Operating in a multi-county service region, investigators are able to take advantage of an array of facilities available through FAU’s six different campuses. FAU has well-equipped labs in areas such as molecular and protein chemistry, drug discovery, microscopy and cellular analysis, clinical trial studies, high performance computing, and ecology, to name a few. The university is also home to more than 38 research institutes and centers. FAU’s institutes and centers reflect FAU’s research strengths (for example, the Institute for Ocean and Systems Engineering—SeaTech, the Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center, the Florida Center for Environmental Studies, and the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, among others).
In addition to the resources available through the university, FAU investigators can also avail themselves of the close partnerships that FAU has formed with world-renowned research organizations based in South Florida. FAU scientists can form collaborations with such prominent research organizations as Scripps Florida and the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (both of which are located on FAU’s Jupiter campus). FAU has established reciprocity agreements with these institutions, allowing FAU investigators to use their prominent core facilities at a reduced rate.
Opportunities are also available for partnering with the local private sector and commercializing research. The Research Park at Florida Atlantic University, housed on the Boca Raton campus, is the only state university-affiliated research park in South Florida. It provides a space for growing research technology and is home to high tech companies. FAU has also launched Tech Runway, which provides a mentoring program for entrepreneurs and their technology start-up ventures. One of its partners is the Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry at FAU, thus providing a means for FAU students to launch their enterprising ideas.
FAU investigators can also rely on a well-managed infrastructure to support their research efforts. More than 40 employees in the Division of Research are available to assist investigators with a range of proposal needs — from proposal submission to post-award activities to technology transfer. The Division of Research maintains a Research Integrity office that assists investigators with IRB and IACUC protocols; it also provides regular training in the responsible conduct of research. FAU’s Veterinary Services unit employs a full-time veterinarian and support staff.
The FAU Libraries operate on five different university campuses and house approximately 3.7 million books, periodicals, government documents, microforms, maps, media and other materials. The electronic resources of the library include more than 408,100 full-text electronic books and 23,500 full-text electronic journals. Special collections, including one on early America, are also available.
DOROTHY F. SCHMIDT COLLEGE OF ARTS AND LETTERS
The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters is comprised of 12 departments: Anthropology, Communication and Multimedia Studies, English, History, Languages, Linguistics & Comparative Literature, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Theatre and Dance, Visual Arts and Art History, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Faculty members in the college engage in a wide array of research, scholarly and creative activities, and the faculty is committed to growing research endeavors in the College’s four main disciplinary concentrations: the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Faculty members in departments across the College engage in wide array of scholarly activities and have won prestigious awards such as Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, the O’Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and the Foreign Policy Association Medal, among others. One of the College’s signature themes is the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Initiative, which brings scholars and artists from across the university together to work on research, pedagogy, and community outreach.
Research and creative achievements in the Arts includes the departments comprising the School of the Arts: Music, Theatre, Visual Arts and Art History. Faculty members in the Department of Music are active regionally, nationally and internationally as solo and collaborative performers, conductors, recording artists, scholars, composers, educators, lecturers, adjudicators and mentors. The faculty of the Department of Visual Arts and Art History, through their own significant research and creative activities, fosters the preservation of artistic legacies with an interest in originality and innovation within artistic and research practice. The faculty in the Department of Theatre and Dance are a community of artists and scholars dedicated to teaching, researching and serving the theater arts in Southeastern Florida. The School of the Arts is home to the University Theatre, two black box theaters, the Schmidt University Galleries, The Ritter Gallery, Second Avenue Studio Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, a visual arts complex comprised of multiple studio spaces for painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, ceramics, printmaking, digital imaging and graphic design. The Commercial Music program boasts a state-of-the-art recording studio, which produces several CDs each year through Hoot Wisdom. The College just opened a new professional resident theatre company, FAU’s Theatre Lab, which features riveting new plays and astonishing new musicals. Fine wine and light dinner fare complete the Theatre experience at the Theatre Lab Café, both located on the first floor of the Parliament Hall.
Humanities research is conducted by faculty members working in individual departments and in cross-disciplinary teams from the departments of English, History, Languages, Linguistics & Comparative Literature, and Philosophy. English faculty contribute both scholarly manuscripts on literature as well as award-winning creative writing projects in poetry, fiction and non-fiction. The Department of History includes highly recognized authors of scholarly books, essays and articles in American, European, Asian and Latin American history. The department is steward of the Weiner “Spirit of America” Collection and hosts the annual Larkin symposium on the U.S presidency. Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature faculty publish on world literatures, cultures and languages that are relevant to the local community in South Florida and the Caribbean and Latin America, but also beyond, to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Our Linguistics faculty contribute cutting-edge research on semiotics, second language acquisition, phonetics, psycholinguistics, and endangered languages and have recently established a state-of-the-art Acoustics Research lab. The Philosophy faculty contribute to a variety of subfields in their discipline and edit an undergraduate journal. The Schmidt Eminent Scholar of the Humanities Dr. Richard Shusterman and colleagues have developed the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. Two other college Eminent Scholars, Dr. Fred Greenspahn and Dr. Alan Berger, hold research chairs in Judaic Studies and Holocaust Studies, respectively. Recently, the college supported an interdisciplinary cluster of research activity in Digital Humanities and Social Justice. The Digital Humanities and Social Justice group focuses on topics such as immigration reform, freedom of speech, human rights and discrimination; in order to advance its mission, the group is able to take advantage of a newly-created Advanced Media Production Lab at FAU.
Research in the Social Sciences focuses on issues that are of importance to the South Florida region, as well as topics of national and international implications. Investigators in the department of Anthropology are actively conducting research on focus areas such as the evolution of the human brain, archaeology and human-environment interactions. Investigators in this department have made important findings, such as recent the discovery of a new species of African monkey, known as the Lesula, by Dr. Kate Detwiler. Faculty research in this department is supported by 4,000 feet of laboratory facilities that include a complete physical processing and cataloguing complex for preparation and preservation of archaeological and osteological specimens, facilities for drafting, lithic imaging and bone histology. There is also a complete woodworking shop to construct and maintain research equipment. The department is also home to the Southeast Region Center for Public Archaeology, sponsored by the Florida Public Archaeology Network and an archaeology field school in Ecuador. The Department of Sociology’s research interests range across the field: welfare policy and rural poverty, global social movements, environmental struggles, food systems, outbreaks of political violence, the social determinants of prejudices, the social construction of self and identity – and more. The faculty in the Department of Political Science pursue four lines of research: American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Public Law and Policy. The department hosts the Jack Miller Forum and the award-winning Diplomacy Program.
Researchers in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies (SCMS) study a wide array of human communicative activities, ranging from face-to-face human interactions to mediated communication to computer animation. Crossing disciplines in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, faculty of this school produce scholarship and creative work ranging from rhetorical studies to film and media studies to cross-cultural communication studies to journalism to visual media and film production. The school is home to a variety of digital media initiatives including a classical radio station, a campus TV station, various film and alternative media festivals, the American Democracy Project and three scholarly journals. A truly unique collaboration between SCMS and Living Room Theaters (LRT) provides the community with first-run, independent, and all-digital cinema from around the globe during evening hours. During the day, LRT provides graduate students with four state-of-the-art theaters in which to teach and screen films.
Research in the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies is interdisciplinary and has grown from the strengths that researchers both inside and outside of the college have cultivated. The Surviving Slavery: Sex Trafficking in South Florida group was created in order to address the gap in outreach efforts to victims of sex trafficking. The research cluster’s focus is tightly connected to the make-up of the FAU and South Florida population, both of which are comprised of high numbers of working-class and immigrant peoples; as such, these populations can be effective in forming connections to the issue and building support for victims.
COLLEGE OF BUSINESS
The College of Business is among the largest colleges of Business in the United States, with over 8,000 students, six departments, several centers for research and engagement and a comprehensive slate of interdisciplinary and professional development programs. Named one of the “Best Business Schools” in 2012 by The Princeton Review, the College offers general business programs in each of the core business disciplines including Accounting, Economics, Finance, Information Technology, Management and Marketing. Specialized programs include Hospitality Management, Sport Management, and Health Care Administration. The FAU College of Business is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and the Association to Advance College School of Business (AACSB), a designation held by only 719 business schools in 48 countries.
Research centers include the Adams Center for Entrepreneurship and the FAU Center for Economic Education. The Adams Center for Entrepreneurship coordinates the annual FAU Business Plan Competition, which gives FAU students, alumni, local middle and high school students and members of the business community an opportunity to test their business ideas. The FAU Center for Economic Education promotes economic education by offering in-service workshops and programs for K-12 educators in its service area. These workshops and programs emphasize active learning techniques to introduce economics, personal finance and entrepreneurship into a number of subjects, including geography, mathematics, history, civics as well as many other subjects. Since 2004, the Center has offered 115 programs to 2,100 teachers. The total contact hours of these programs have totaled almost 500 hours. Many of the programs provided teachers with either print materials or CD-ROMs of curriculum materials.
The College of Business also houses a state-of-the-art Trading Room that seats 40 people and showcases real time feeds from Reuters. The Trading Room replicates a real-world financial trading experience and functions as a classroom and a laboratory that puts FAU graduates on the leading edge in the financial services industry. In partnership with Bloomberg®, the Financial Analyst Program (FAP) equips students with cutting edge skills in financial analysis and equity research.
COLLEGE FOR DESIGN AND SOCIAL INQUIRY