OSWEGO, N.Y. — SUNY Oswego says a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation will help collaborations between its School of Business and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as with four similar universities.
The NSF “Cross-Continental Collaboration Coalition (C4)” grant will bring about $400,000 to Oswego over the course of three years, the school said.
It’s the first time the NSF has awarded funding to the SUNY Oswego School of Business and represents a “different type of opportunity,” Prabakar Kothandaraman, dean of the School of Business and principal investigator, said in the school’s announcement.
“NSF is a known entity in supporting scientific research, often for highly research-intensive universities,” Kothandaraman said. “This one looks at how to promote innovations and entrepreneurship, and how to put that research to good use by practitioners.”
Co-principal investigators also include Michele Thornton and Mohammad Tajvarpour from the School of Business as well as Mohammad Islam and Hui Zhang, who are professors in College of Liberal Arts Sciences. Islam, who works in the physics and astronomy department, and Zhang, who is part of the electrical and computer engineering department, are both active researchers working on projects related to sustainable energy.
“Institutions such as ours, who take pride in high-quality teaching, supply students in many of these areas,” Kothandaraman noted. “The NSF also recognizes that SUNY Oswego is not alone in this. Other institutions that emphasize high-quality teaching are into this as well. They wanted like-minded institutions interested in coming together to solve a problem, so they brought them together in such a cohort.”
Under this grant, SUNY Oswego is collaborating with schools having similar profiles that include California State University, Chico; University of Central Oklahoma; Central Washington University; and Weber State University in Utah.
“It’s a pretty unusual NSF grant. They were very open to schools of business taking the lead on it,” Thornton said.
“The NSF was very encouraging, and wanted to be very supportive and collaborative,” Thornton said. “It was a little like speed dating. Normally in this process, every other university is one you’re competing with for that grant. The NSF made it clear when we made it to the next round that they had enough support for 50 universities. You were there to literally help and cheerlead for each other.”