
Academic and Research Excellence Update
December 9, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
We’re writing with a special edition of our regular Academic and Research Excellence Update to introduce our newest major initiative to enhance and support your scholarship: Purdue University Books Initiative (video link).
Available to any Purdue author, we will provide robust support for authors by way of substantive overload payments alongside individualized “concierge service” support in book design, editing, and production. The latest news on key investments, new tools, services and initiatives that support, incentivize, and reward YOUR scholarly impact and research excellence at Purdue also follow.
With best wishes for safe and happy holidays,
Karen Plaut, Executive Vice President for Research
Chris Ruhl, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer
Patrick Wolfe, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Diversity
Special announcement
Purdue University Books Initiative
Books enhance our scholarly understanding and generate impact both inside and outside the academy. They serve to summarize long-term research contributions, introduce innovative insights into quickly evolving areas and crystallize years of teaching experience into a mature course design. Open access publishing also reduces textbook costs for our students — further advancing our commitment to affordability.
As academic book preparation and publishing require significant time and effort, we recently launched the Purdue University Books Initiative to address these demands. Available to any Purdue author, this initiative will provide robust support for authors by way of substantive overload payments alongside individualized “concierge service” support in book design, editing, and production.
Additional activities under the Purdue Books Initiative will involve expanding connections with many publishing houses, organizing monthly webinars with reputable editors, and increasing recognition of authors and scholarly work published in the form of books. To learn more about this initiative, authors can visit the Office of Provost website or contact Cristina Farmus, vice president for special projects.
Additional Academic and Research Excellence Updates:
Enhancing Scholarship
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‘Elevating the Visibility of Research’ seed funding awardees announced. Several faculty members writing books, review articles and monographs recently won seed funding from the ‘Elevating the Visibility of Research’ program, which provides up to $10,000 to support these efforts. The winning submissions represent work on 46 books and 29 articles by faculty in 11 colleges or schools. A full list of awardees and their works is available here. Details about the seed funding program are available from associate deans for research and online.
‘Elevating the Visibility of Research’ seed funding winners are also eligible for support through the Purdue University Books Initiative.
Faculty Support
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Mandatory research security training and certification due. Purdue requires all faculty members involved in federally funded research to complete research security training and a foreign talent recruitment plan certification. This mandatory training is necessary to satisfy new federal requirements intended to safeguard the academic research enterprise against misappropriation of U.S. research and development. Additionally, all faculty who apply for federal funding from NSF or DoD will be required to certify that they do not participate in a Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Program in order to submit their proposals.
The deadline for the Colleges of Agriculture, Engineering, and Science, and Polytechnic Institute was Dec. 1. The deadline for other colleges is Dec. 31. Faculty need to complete this training by Dec. 31 to ensure continuous funding for existing grants and to understand foreign travel and its requirements.
The training and certification is available through Purdue’s new learning module for research security training portal. More information is available on the Research Security website.
- IRB open office hours for spring. Jeff Haddad and Dan Foti, chairs of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for human subjects and its associated processes, have announced their office hours for this spring. Beginning in January, walk-in sessions will be: Mondays, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.; Tuesdays, 1-2:30 p.m.; Wednesdays, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.; and Thursdays, 10-11:30 a.m. Office hours with senior analysts will be on Tuesdays, 2:30-4 p.m. All sessions are in Room 1005 of YONG. More information is available online.
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Open-access publishing partnerships. To extend the reach of journal articles published by faculty, Purdue has entered into agreements with several major academic publishers. These agreements include an option for open-access publishing at no cost to authors (no article-processing charges) and without incurring embargoes. To date, these agreements have led to considerable savings in publishing fees for Purdue faculty authors. Details about each publishing partnership are available in this guide.
Purdue also provides a variety of support and funding to any Purdue West Lafayette faculty member, researcher, post-doc, staff member or graduate student engaged in open-access publishing. For more information, contact the Purdue Libraries team.
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Purdue University Research Repository obtains CoreTrustSeal approval. This fall, the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), which provides a data-sharing platform with a collaborative workspace and full spectrum research data management support for Purdue Researchers, became an approved CoreTrustSeal data repository.
CoreTrustSeal approval reflects PURR’s commitment to being a high-quality, trustworthy and reliable data repository. For the research community, this approval is a significant milestone because it provides additional, formal validation of PURR’s compliance with federal funding agencies’ required data repository characteristics. It also benefits researchers who submit data management plans with grant proposals and who use PURR for data sharing and preservation. For more information, contact the PURR team at purr@purdue.edu.
AI/Supercomputing
- Gautschi supercomputer launch. The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) recently dedicated its newest community cluster, the Gautschi supercomputer. Gautschi is a critical addition to the next generation of Purdue’s “community cluster” supercomputing network. It features cutting-edge technology for traditional simulation and research while also offering NVIDIA’s top-tier solutions for AI applications. Gautschi is No. 157 on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and No. 43 on the Green 500 list of energy efficient supercomputers. To learn more about the Gautschi cluster, email rcac-help@purdue.edu.
- AI training events. This spring, the RCAC will offer several training sessions focused on AI (listed below). Faculty, staff and graduate students can find more information by contacting RCAC team at rcac-help@purdue.edu.
- NVIDIA DLI Fundamentals of Deep Learning
- Enhancing Generative AI with Retrieval Augmented Generation
- Generative AI Series Part 1: Prompt Engineering
- Generative AI Series Part 2: Underlying Architecture and Mechanics
- Generative AI Series Part 3: Tuning Custom Models
- Purdue GenAI Studio free to faculty. The Institute for Physical AI (IPAI) and RCAC are offering researchers a new AI software service — Purdue GenAI Studio. Purdue GenAI Studio provides open-source LLM models to researchers at Purdue. During its pilot stage, Purdue GenAI Studio is free to use. More details are available here.
Funding
Purdue promotes PIVOT as preferred research funding search tool. To ensure Purdue researchers can find optimal funding, the Office of Research recently completed an assessment of various funding search tool options. This has led to Purdue retaining PIVOT as our primary research funding search tool.
PIVOT allows researchers to save search criteria for topics of interest and receive automated emails with weekly matches of new funding opportunities. Also, PIVOT’s prepopulated faculty profiles enable viewing and searching profiles across Purdue and beyond to identify possible research collaborations. Researchers can create a PIVOT profile and set funding alerts and tracking options. Online tutorials and a one-page Pivot Quick Reference Guide are also available. If you have any questions or would like a one-on-one demonstration, please email Sue Grimes.
Awards
- Call for research award nominations. The Faculty Recognition Office has announced a call for nominations for two prestigious awards: the Benjamin Franklin Medals and Golden Goose Award. Faculty members who wish to nominate others or who are interested in being nominated for these or other recognitions are encouraged to contact the Faculty External Recognition Program.
- Kinley Trust Award recipients. Five Purdue faculty members have received the 2024 Kinley Award, which funds social science research by West Lafayette-based faculty to explore methods for improving the human condition. Established by the Clifford B. Kinley Trust in 1978, the Kinley Award funds social science research to explore methods for improving the human condition. Each recipient will receive approximately $25,000 in research funding. The list of winners is online at the Office of Research website.
- Showalter Trust honors. The Ralph W. and Grace M. Showalter Research Trust recently appointed four Purdue professors as Showalter Faculty Scholars and provided 12 early career faculty members with 2024 research grants. In addition to selecting midcareer professionals as Showalter Faculty Scholars and providing one-year funding for early career professionals, the trust also supports two Showalter Distinguished Professors at Purdue, Charles Bouman and Kinam Park. More details and a list of winners are available here.