Wise Investigator

Dear Administrator:

• Are your early-career faculty struggling to win funding? 
• Do senior colleagues not have bandwidth to provide the mentorship junior colleagues need?
• Are in-house research development resources dedicated to large, complex submissions, leaving early-career faculty without support?
• Do you rely exclusively on webinars and workshops to train faculty in the skills needed to acquire funding?

If so, please allow me to introduce you to a unique program that assists pre-tenure faculty in improving their results with funding for externally sponsored STEM-oriented research. Research that benefits their careers, their departments, institutions, grad students and the public.

Wise Investigator is not a proposal-writing service. Instead, it is a comprehensive set of expertly guided skill-acquisition exercises that have shown positive results over the past two years.

It serves mostly early-career faculty, helping them develop the hard and soft skills essential in today’s marketplace, equipping them with the knowledge of the written and unwritten principles of funder cultivation and, ultimately, success in responding to agency announcements and solicitations.

Over its initial 24+ months, Wise Investigator has engaged dozens of pre-tenure faculty at more than 30 prominent US institutions. Subscriptions to our weekly newsletter have quietly grown to more than 700.

My name is Julia Barzyk, and I hold a PhD in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago. My pre-Chicago experience includes degrees from the universities of Rochester and Florida.

Before starting Wise Investigator, I served ten years as a Program Manager with the US Army Research Office in Durham, NC, where I managed the process from the other side.

It was in my ARO position that I saw the importance of communication, self-presentation, time management, collaboration, and other skills in achieving success with funding agencies and organizations.

When PIs struggled to successfully engage with the funding process, I searched for resources to point them to. When I could not find them, I knew I needed to develop them myself, so I established Wise Investigator to do just that.

Beyond STEM, Wise Investigator has no specific academic discipline or sponsor focus. The cost of the program is typically paid with the participant’s startup funds and/or other institutional support.

Again, Wise Investigator is not a proposal-writing service, although we support participants in the preparation of one ‘good-fit’ proposal.

We endorse the familiar maxim that, rather than handing out fish dinners, we prefer to teach the client how to fish -- the major pieces of which are below.

Common Challenges the Wise Investigator Program Addresses