Research and Scholarship

Research awards, including highly-competitive awards, in FY17 were $24.2 million, down from $35.8 in FY16, in part due to “holds” on the release of federal funds attributed to the change in administration of the U.S. government. The number of proposals submitted increased from FY16 (266) to FY17 (300) and the number of awards decreased to 83 in FY17 from 108 in FY16.  A business plan was developed for the Stevens Venture Center. The Patent Administrator managed an overall portfolio of 75 issued patents, 41 pending applications, and 240 disclosures.

Goal R1

Deploy policies that further empower and enable our faculty to innovate and conduct high quality research, produce high impact research publications, and develop and experiment with promising new teaching and learning approaches.

OWNERS: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE, VICE PRESIDENT LOUIS MAYER, AND FACULTY SENATE

1. Office of Sponsored Projects Policy: Nine operational policies were created and/or revised in FY17 to address process and risk reduction. Two additional policies were initiated and are in progress: institutional base salary and faculty workload.

2. Policy – Stevens Venture Center – Key highlights include:

   • Business plan developed with vision, strategy and execution priorities;

   • 13 member companies (currently at 17);

   • First Advisory Board meeting in mid-summer 2017; and 

   • A draft plan (subject to approval) to open to community companies as of 1Q-2018.

3. Faculty Research Impact:

   • Regular information sharing and discussion with Deans regarding faculty proposal/award activity and incentives to increase productivity;

   • Regular one-on-one meetings held with many T/TT faculty; 

   • Bi-weekly telephone meetings held with lobbyist to better understand the political and legislative landscape and advance Stevens’ funding priorities; 

   • Engagement with NSF, NIH, DoD, DOE, DARPA, National Laboratories and NIST program managers in support of faculty research; and

   • Engagement with multiple corporations and foundations in support of faculty research.

4. Faculty Development:

   • 2nd Annual CAREER Workshop and coaching through proposal submission;

   • Provided technical editorial contribution to 100 grant proposals and 30 peer-reviewed journal articles;

   • Strategic pillar development contribution; and

   • Faculty members who have served as NSF and NIH reviewers provided “lessons learned” used to develop course on “Crafting a successful NSF or NIH Proposal.”

5. Ph.D. development: Revamped Innovation & Entrepreneurship Doctoral Fellowship Program to apply a quantitative process for selection/evaluation of Fellows and encourage increased commercialization.

Goal R2

Stevens will design and construct an Innovation & Design Laboratory.

OWNERS: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE AND VICE PRESIDENT ROBERT MAFFIA

The IDEaS (Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship at Stevens) program and PROOF (Prototype Object Fabrication) Laboratory have been operational for more than a year. All PROOF Laboratory programs (“Print from the Net,” “Borrow a Printer,” “Design for Rapid Prototyping Consultations,” and CNC machining support) have been fully rolled out to the Stevens community. These services support all Design Spine course, capstone senior design courses, freshman entrepreneurial thinking courses, and senior innovation courses. Additionally, several research groups have access to the PROOF Laboratory for printing needs. 

Revisions to the Design Spine course curriculum began with Design-I (E-121) and Design III (E-231) content revisions as well as laboratory facility renovation. The instructional capacity has been increased and the laboratory section sizes have been decreased by 35 percent. The ABS Design space has been configured as a prototyping facility for senior design as an on-demand, time-shared, and collaborative space. 

Curriculum modernization pilots include: consistent use of software tools (Solidworks for CAD, Matlab/Simulink for Modeling, and Labview for sensing and experimentation) throughout the Design Spine, with each course reinforcing and advancing the student skillset; deployment of a peer-evaluation tool (CATME) to increase teamwork effectiveness; and updates to several laboratory activities with modernized tools and data analytic methods. Students continue to have access to the Stevens Venture Center for exploring entrepreneurial value and opportunities for their innovative ideas.

Goal R3

Externally-supported annual research awards will increase from $25.6M in 2012 to $45M in 2017 and $66.5M in 2022.

OWNER: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE

Research awards decreased to $24.2M in FY17, in part due to “holds” on the release of federal funds attributed to the change in administration of the U.S. government. 

Highly-Competitive Awards (as of November 2, 2017):

Initiatives such as Research Incentives Awards (return of indirect costs), Ignition Grants and Tuition Reimbursement continued to be judiciously awarded and closely monitored to ensure effective use of these incentives.

Goal R4

The annual ratio of graduating Ph.D. students per T/TT faculty member will be at least 0.6 by 2022 from the 2011 baseline of 0.38 for those programs that offer Ph.D. degrees.

OWNER: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE

The number of Ph.D. degrees awarded per T/TT instructional faculty in programs that offer Ph.D. degrees was .37 in AY16-17, compared to .35 in AY15-16.

Goal R5

Stevens will have at least 6 designated national research centers from the current baseline of 3 in 2012.

OWNER: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE

Government Sponsored Centers
Discussions continued toward the establishment of SARDI (Stevens-ARDEC Research and Development Center). The first funding was received for quantum photonic fire control studies. 

Development of New Stevens Centers
Progress has been made in developing new centers that have the potential for large-scale funding. 

• CDQC (Center for Distributed Quantum Computing): Established in October 2015 by Director Yuping Huang. The center’s collaboration activities have generated 11 grants/contracts totaling approximately $7M.

• iCON (Institute for Cognitive Networking): Launched in September 2015 with funds from NSF, ICASA, and SITA to support U.S. and South African R&D teams. iCON’s inaugural workshop was held in January 2016 and recently hosted the IEEE 5G Summit in Cape Town in October 2017.

• CDDA (Center for Dynamic Data Analysis): This center has been merged with a new center, the NSF Center for Visual and Decision Informatics, in 2017 due to reorganizations within NSF. Director Steven Yang is repositioning the Stevens NSF I/UCRC site to focus on financial services and cybersecurity analytics.

• A new Center for Applied Sensing Technology (CAST) is in development.

Nurturing of Existing Centers
A Centers Day information exchange was held in May 2017 to educate faculty about the efforts, activities, and relationship building efforts developed at each center. Seven center directors made presentations.

Goal R6

A significant percentage of Stevens T/TT faculty will be serving in prestigious service positions, e.g., on national advisory boards, editorial boards and in positions of leadership within academic and industry associations.

OWNER: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE

Participation of faculty in professional societies and a variety of service positions remains similar to Year 4.  The FY17 Faculty Activity Report is currently being mined by the schools and college to gather faculty service data. Additionally, a separate questionnaire is being developed as a supplemental data-gathering instrument, after evaluation of the Faculty Activity Report is completed.

Goal R7

We will conduct a review of the incentives and policies that would advance the engagement of faculty and students in entrepreneurial activities, including liberalizing our intellectual property (IP) policy.

OWNER: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE

The Intellectual Property Committee (IPC) now includes Entrepreneurs-In-Residence and has rotated faculty participation in order to provide a fresh view of both the novelty and the commercial potential of faculty patent disclosures and applications. Each faculty patent is assigned a resource within the School of Business to assist them in the development of a business plan – an area that was not well-supported in prior patent disclosures and/or application requests to the IPC.

In FY17, Stevens accepted 22 of 53 submitted Disclosures, filed 12 provisional applications, and received 11 issued Patents. This was a more discriminating ratio than in prior years. The Patent Administrator managed an overall portfolio of 75 issued patents, 41 pending applications, and 240 disclosures.

IP Consultation was provided for four SVC companies, 13 student-run projects, and numerous faculty from every academic unit.

Goal R8

We will achieve an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship on campus that includes innovators and entrepreneurs who see the value of associating themselves with Stevens.

OWNER: PROVOST CHRISTOPHE PIERRE

The number of Entrepreneurs-in-Residence in the Stevens Venture Center (SVC) increased to 33 as of May 2017. Four members were invited to join the SVC Advisory Board during FY17 (currently there are six active Advisory Board Members). Sixteen member companies were active in the SVC during FY17.

Four vertical sources of external funds were established:

• Received $50K licensing revenue from start-up companies;

• NJ Health Foundation awarded $340k in grants to Stevens faculty for commercialization of life science projects;

• Verizon Innovations awarded $150K to sponsor cell/wireless technologies; and

• An alumnus donated $50K to start the Stevens Entrepreneurial Faculty Fund.

Thirty-seven entrepreneurial events were sponsored including hackathons, pitch competitions, multiple invited speaker events, LaunchPad event, EIR Networking events, Tech Meet-ups, SVC Meet-ups, Propelify, and Innovation Expo.