Staff Excellence: Proposal Strategy and Development team

Within the Office of Research is a five-person team devoted to supporting faculty in the research grant writing process. Purdue’s proposal strategy and development team offers researchers a full spectrum of proposal development services and resources that range from guidance and templates for single-investigator proposals to fully embedded support on large-scale center-level efforts.

Led by Director Sally Bond, the team — which includes Aimee Jo Gibney, David Stucker, Jackie Thompson and Allison Troutner — works with faculty members to implement best-practice strategies from concept development and win themes to content generation and proposal review. Bond shared, “While this is certainly a fast-paced environment, we enjoy our front-row seat to some of the most transformative research being done across campus.”

“We work closely with principal investigators and teams to customize our best-practice strategies to their particular funding requirements, time frames and project management needs,” added Bond. “We emphasize creating storylines to vet ideas and map proposal requirements into clear writing templates. From strategy development to assistance with copyediting and visualization ideas, our proposal writing specialists are hands-on in helping investigators produce highly compelling submissions.”

Preeti Sivasankar, vice president of research innovation, shared, “Our goal is to personalize engagement to fully support our faculty colleagues. Proposal development can seem to be a formidable challenge, especially when pursuing large-scale, multi-institutional funding opportunities. Our team is here to assist faculty with start-to-finish proposal assistance, which I believe is true team excellence.”

In addition to individualized support, this team also offers a number of proposal development resources and grant writing workshops that are popular among faculty members.

According to Bond, “We prioritize large center proposals as well as help early-career faculty with submission to prestigious CAREER and Young Investigator Program funding opportunities. Because we work across colleges, an added benefit that we provide is mobilizing cross-campus expertise, infrastructure and resources as key win differentiators.”

To learn more or to contact this team, visit the Office of Research/Research Innovation website.