Between research, teaching, service and career building, faculty members have a lot on their plates. Navigating applying for large federal grants for the first time can be prohibitively difficult or time-consuming, particularly in a shifting grants landscape, but the Propel Research Mentorship Program offers nine months of intensive mentorship, education, workshops and editing support to facilitate the process.
Propel programs support faculty applying for funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and NSF CAREER.
We spoke to participants of Propel and the NSF CAREER Bootcamp to learn more about their experiences with the programs.
Ahmed Alshareef | Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing | Propel Mentorship NIH
Ahmed Alshareef studies injury biomechanics—how impact affects body tissue, at what point impact becomes injury and how to modify equipment like airbags and football helmets to prevent harm. Specifically, he’s interested in how brain tissue stretches and deforms during high impact head collisions.
The problem? There aren’t many safe ways to observe that deformation in real time.
Researchers have largely relied on computer models and simulations for past studies, but Alshareef and his team will combine tagged magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a method of capturing video footage of the motion of the brain within the skull at slow speeds in human volunteers, with sonomicrometry, an innovative technique in which embedded sensors measure displacement in the brains of donated medical cadavers.
The approach is promising –the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institutes of Health are funding Alshareef and his team’s $2.6 million project.
It was nice to have lessons as part of the Propel program every month to give us the tricks of the trade, but also to have a dedicated mentor and a group of people along the same journey.
Alshareef, who began his role as an assistant professor at USC in 2023, enlisted the help of the Propel Mentorship Program to get him to this point.
“Starting out, you don’t have much experience in grant writing, and especially in leading a large proposal and multi-institutional project like this,” says Alshareef. “It was nice to have lessons as part of the Propel program every month to give us the tricks of the trade, but also to have a dedicated mentor and a group of people along the same journey. It’s beneficial to have the advice and feedback from colleagues that are outside your field because they look at the project from a different perspective.”
In addition to mentorship and accountability through monthly deadlines, the hands-on experiences with workshopping his grant provided feedback that was invaluable to Alshareef’s proposal success.
“At the end of Propel, we had a mock study section, where we read other people’s grants and scored them like NIH reviewers would,” says Alshareef. “It helped strengthen made my grant before submission. Reading other people’s grants and understanding the factors that improve and lower scores was my favorite part of the Propel experience.”
Alissa Armstrong | Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, McCausland College of Arts and Sciences | NSF CAREER Bootcamp
At first glance, humans and fruit flies don’t have much in common-- but the resemblance is much greater at the cellular level.
Alissa Armstrong examines pathways fruit flies use to communicate nutritional status between fat tissue and ovaries, a mechanism mirrored in humans that has profound implications for nutrition and reproduction.
Funded by an NSF CAREER award, which will support both her research and a community outreach project with Family Promise of the Midlands, Armstrong plans to study the Target of Rapamycin (TOR) pathway, which, when blocked, allows fruit flies to produce eggs but not to ovulate.
Faculty members are very well-versed in the science, we know our projects, but the paperwork-y parts of the grants are more of a challenge to figure out because those things change all the time. To have somebody who’s an expert in that is quite helpful, so we had lots of resources and tools to use.”
Armstrong signed up for the NSF CAREER Bootcamp to set herself up for proposal success. “Faculty members are very well-versed in the science, we know our projects, but the paperwork-y parts of the grants are more of a challenge to figure out because those things change all the time,” she says. “To have somebody who’s an expert in that is quite helpful, so we had lots of resources and tools to use.”
This year, the bootcamp will be replaced with a full-fledged Propel track that increases the level of support and access to resources available to those seeking NSF CAREER awards, retaining the structure and deadlines that have helped past participants.
“The thing that helped me the most was having deliverables, to get feedback by a certain time. One of my biggest challenges is meeting deadlines,” says Armstrong. “Having that accountability was a major thing to help get something completed.”
Pawel Nadel-Turonski | Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, McCausland College of Arts and Sciences | Propel Mentorship NSF
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.
For anyone who has taken a high school physics course, this law of science is familiar. But it has a loophole, one that binds our universe: this principle can be violated if energy is “paid back” quickly enough, allowing particles to share energy with each other and therefore generate forces such as electromagnetism, gravity and strong interaction.
Strong interaction, a force that generates nearly all the world’s mass through the exchange of particles called gluons, is what interests Pawel Nadel-Turonski most. Using funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, Nadel-Turonski and his team will map structures within the nuclei of atoms to better understand how these forces operate to generate mass.
I could talk with my colleagues who do nuclear physics, but the reviewers of these proposals tend to come from a much broader background. That was very helpful because you need to write the proposal in a way which is clear and appealing not only to the people who do exactly what you do but also other potential reviewers.
Nadel-Turonski came to USC in 2024 from the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science with Stony Brook University, bringing with him a wealth of research experience and a well-developed program of study, but he wanted to get familiar with the university’s grant process as well.
“The Propel program was very useful because it created a link between all the resources here and provided all kinds of good advice for how to proceed with the NSF grant,” says Nadel-Turonski. “The resources for turning the science part into a good proposal and making sure that everything was well-written, the budgets were all good and everything works well from the point of view of the grant proposal is important.”
He also appreciated mentorship from Natalia Shustova, professor of chemistry.
“I could talk with my colleagues who do nuclear physics, but the reviewers of these proposals tend to come from a much broader background,” he says. “That was very helpful because you need to write the proposal in a way which is clear and appealing not only to the people who do exactly what you do but also other potential reviewers.”