Working Group Proposal Template
Please label your proposal by your synthesis question name. Completed, full proposals can be submitted by email to NCEMS@psu.edu
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Working Group?
Working Groups are the main drivers of research at NCEMS. They are formed by groups of two to four faculty and up to four trainees (graduate students and postdocs) around a community-scale synthesis research question, data organization effort, or methodological development.
What is the NCEMS model for supporting Working Groups?
NCEMS uses a collaborative, in-kind support model in which NCEMS scientists collaborate with and support the Working Group, with the NCEMS scientists typically taking the lead in organizing publicly available data into an easy-to-analyze intermediate data product, that is then handed off to Working Group members to apply their subject matter expertise to address the community scale synthesis problem in which they are interested. NCEMS Staff Scientists can, when they have relevant expertise, carry out preliminary analyses on the data product on behalf of the Working Group. Thus, over the lifetime of the Working Group project, majority effort falls on NCEMS scientists working under the guidance of the Working Group in early stages, and in later stages this majority effort shifts to Working Group.
How many Working Groups will be selected?
NCEMS will select four to six new Working Groups to support starting in 2027. Based on last year’s application round, we anticipate a proposal success rate of 33 to 58%.
Will my lab receive direct financial support from NCEMS?
No – NCEMS provides in-kind support to Working Groups in the form of Staff Scientist time, travel funding, cyberinfrastructure, and various other support mechanisms. A full list of in-kind support is provided in the table below. The synthesis challenges working groups face are cross-cutting. By centralizing resources, such as expert data scientists, bioinformaticians, mass spec experts, and computational biologists, NCEMS is able to achieve economies of scale to lower the four primary barriers to synthesis research for scientists in molecular and cellular biology: data science skills, methodological working knowledge, team science, and statistics expertise.
What in-kind support do Working Groups receive?
Working Groups will receive, over a standard 2-year project term:
Resource | Description | Time commitment | Cash equivalent |
Staff Scientist support | Ph.D. trained scientists with experience in data science, programming, computational biology, bioinformatics, and machine learning | 8 months | $166,730 |
Staff Scientist Assistant support | Less experienced, subject matter experts at NCEMS | 11 months | $73,755 |
In-person Working Group meeting | One in-person, or hybrid meeting | 3 days | $14,000 |
Cyberinfrastructure | Unlimited data storage on CyVerse, aid with acquiring any additional computational resources that are needed | 2 years | $56,274 |
Project Manager | High-level coordination of research efforts across the team | 2 years | $23,310 |
Event Coordinator | Coordinates in-person and training events | 2 years | $5,266 |
Open and Team Science training and facilitation | Training of Working Group members in team and open science | ~6 days | $5,000 |
Publication costs | Open Access costs | N/A | $5,000 |
Working Group personnel exchange | Enables Working Group members to visit each other’s labs | 2-6 weeks | $4,842 |
Total Value | $354,178 |