Hello, this is Shing Kwok. I'm a
National Program Leader at NIFA's
Institute of Food Production and
Sustainability in the Division of Plant
Production. We're going to transition
into the slides now in regards to the
Centers of Excellence overview. So in the first
slide I wanted to just sort of give you a
background relating to the Centers of
Excellence or COE as we'll call it in
this presentation for short. This was
originally introduced in the 2014 Farm
Bill and if you look at the link that's
provided in the slide there is a listing
of programs in which the Centers of
Excellence opportunities are available
each year for those programs. They may
change from year year, but you should
either check that link or talk to your
program staff to determine whether that
program has consideration for the
Centers of Excellence. So when you look
at a proposal that is submitting for
consideration for the Centers of
Excellence or COE, they need to answer
four specific questions that are
outlined in the following two slides.
This justification is usually at the very end
of the project narrative of the proposal.
That's we have recommended to many
applicants. Sometime, in most cases it's
there, sometimes they put it in somewhere
else, but in all fairness they
should be towards the end of the
project narrative. So the first criteria
they must address is whether the
project that they are describing has the
ability to ensure coordination cost
effectiveness by reducing to efforts in
research, education and extension. The
second is they must provide
justification for the ability to
leverage public-private partnerships.
that...whether that be through
agricultural industry groups,
institutions of higher education or the
federal government, so that resources can
be leveraged relative to the size of the
award. The third criteria that they need
to address and provide justification for
is
the scope of the center of excellence
must also consider implementing teaching
initiatives to increase awareness and
effectiveness in disseminating the
solutions to which the project is
focused towards. And lastly in the fourth
justification they should provide how
their project will provide and how
their being considered a Center of
Excellence provides increased economic
return to rural communities. So those are
the four criteria in which each
application that is being considered for
Center of Excellence needs to provide
justification for. So COE status is
submitted by an applicant for the
duration of the project, so it is not
automatically applied for
an institution as a whole or for other
projects that are submitted by the
project director in the same year.
Proposals will still be reviewed by
merit first, irrespective of the COE
status of that application. When the
final ranking of a proposal is
considered, COE status of the proposal
will be determined for the most highly
ranked proposals within the funding range.
Now, this will be determined by the NPL
and the panel manager and then they will
determine whether COE was requested by
that proposal. Panel members will review
the COE status of the application
requesting COE review according to four
criteria that we had just talked about.
So the way the Centers of Excellence is
being used is that in the event of a tie
in ranking of two applications, the COE
status of an application will be used to
break the tie. That's how this will be
used in terms of the ranking of
proposals. If both applications have COE
status the tie will remain the same.
Applicants will get a boilerplate
statement indicating their COE status
including, that will be included in the
panel summary of the application, and
that their project was reviewed or not
reviewed for the Centers of
Excellence. So in the next couple of
slides is sort of the PRS view of what
panelists will see in terms of an
application that needs to be reviewed
for the Centers of Excellence. So after
the panel has submitted and written and
reviewed their panel summaries, what
happens is the next page within the PRS
system is what you see here in this
slide in the first sort of boxed
area where there's a red box that says
review for COE. So after the panel
summaries have been completed, you'll get
to this page in which you will then
click the Review for COE link to
suggest that this application will be
reviewed for COE. So you'll get to then
this link. And then typically what would
happen is most applications won't be
requesting consideration for the Centers
of Excellence, so many cases the
applicant submitted justification for
COE will be a no and the review for COE
designation will also be a no. That's
probably a majority of the proposals that
you will see. Now for those proposals
that have submitted for COE review it'll
be flagged as a yes and then you
will determine whether it will be
reviewed for COE designation, we'll get
into a little bit of that detail in a
couple slides later. But if an
application is being considered for
designation for COE, you then answer
the next set of questions regarding the
COE review outcome. One is did
it meet the standard, if it did you click
that button for met the standard for COE.
If it did not meet, then click that button.
If not ranked high enough for COE
review, you click that button. Depending
on the situation of each of the
applications that is being submitted for
COE consideration. So in an instance
where someone submitted for COE
review and it was reviewed but it did
not meet, you pick from the four criteria
that we just described which they did
not meet. So in this instance in this
slide they did not
meet
criteria A and B. What will happen is
they will then get a boilerplate
language that is shown in this slide
where it says: yes the applicant
submitted for COE review, they were
reviewed but they did not meet and
the reason why they did not meet is
shown in the COE outcome justification.
It shows that it did not meet A and B,
those are the same ones that you check
in the previous slide. Here are some
recommendations of the numbers of
proposals you should review for the
Centers of Excellence. The recommendation
is you review twice as many proposals
as you plan to fund. Now you should
really go review this with your National
Program Leader just to ensure that that
is the criteria you guys are using. So
what that would mean is for example, if
you plan to fund 10 awards, you only go
down to the 20th proposal to evaluate
Centers of Excellence if they requested
it. Beyond the 20th proposal even if they
had requested themselves as a Center of
Excellence, you could simply say no they
were not reviewed for the Centers of
Excellence. So now that's just a
recommendation and a guideline, you need
to talk to your National Program Leader to really
determine if that's sort of the guiding
principles you will use in determining
Centers of Excellence for submitted
applications. With that I will end
the presentation, we'll go back to the
video.