Academy of Scholars

Date and Time: Sept 11, 2026, 1 p.m. - 2 p.m.

Location: Online (The Zoom link will be provided via the RSVP confirmation email)

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Activity Leader: Dr. James Whyte

Description: The Academy of Scholars has invited Dr. James Whyte, Chair of FSU’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), to lead an informal discussion of the IRB’s procedures, processes, and best practices. Dr. Whyte will discuss issues such as what types of studies are eligible for exempted, expedited, or full Committee review, what counts as an ‘intervention,’ what characteristics must a study have (or not have) for it to be classified as a ‘clinical trial,’ how faculty mentors can support ethical practice in student research, and many other topics relevant to both new and seasoned investigators across the College’s health, human, and social sciences.

Date and Time: October 9, 2026, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Location: Online

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Introduction & Need/Wants Assessment:

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Sarah Johnson, Dr. Beth Phillips, Dr. Jennifer Steiner, Dr. Timothy Baghurst, & Dr. James Du

Description: AoS members will introduce each topic and provide an overview of the related services and resources available. Dr. Sarah Johnson will also perform a needs/wants assessment through survey and listening session approaches that will include engagement of early career faculty. This information will be used to guide and refine activities that will be planned and implemented over the next year(s).

Breakout Session 1. Alignment of Research with Funding Opportunities

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Sarah Johnson

Description: Grants are often denied funding due to inadequately addressing the funding mechanism or required components. This does not imply that faculty should change their research program but rather can provide an opportunity to think outside of the box and initiate interdisciplinary collaborations and creative research approaches. Other times, it simply involves ensuring that grant proposals are written to directly communicate alignment with a program or funding opportunity. Dr. Sarah Johnson will provide guidance and activities on interpreting funding announcements, identifying interdisciplinary collaborations to enhance competitiveness, and framing proposals to clearly convey alignment with program goals/funding mechanisms.

Breakout Session 2. Grant Submission

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Beth Phillips & Dr. Jennifer Steiner

Description: Dr. Beth Phillips and Dr. Jennifer Steiner will discuss the grant submission review services they provide, including project conceptualization and proposal development, study design consultation, formatting and presentation enhancements, and evaluation of proposed aims and experimental approaches.

Breakout Session 3. Publication/Scholarship

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Timothy Baghurst & Dr. James Du

Description: Dr. Timothy Baghurst & Dr. James Du will discuss publication and scholarship services they provide, including study design, model selection, and reviewer-response strategy, and manuscript quality improvement.

​​​​​Date & Time: October 30, 2026, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Location: In Person

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Activity Leader: Dr. Sarah Johnson

Description: Participation and engagement in research-related activities within a university, organization, national society, etc. can provide valuable opportunities for professional visibility, collaboration, leadership development, advancement of personal and institutional research knowledge, and invitations for other service roles. Early-career and some mid-career faculty could benefit from education and discussion surrounding engagement in service activities, including those involving leadership roles, at the university, regional, national, and/or international levels with societies and organizations. Guidance on benefits and potential harms and how to balance such roles with promotion and tenure and/or other job responsibilities, how to find and pursue opportunities, and which opportunities to say yes or no to could be helpful will be provided.

Date and Time: November 20, 2026, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Location: Online

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Introduction

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Beth Phillips, Dr. Jennifer Steiner, & Dr. Timothy Baghurst

Description: AoS members will provide an overview of effective mentoring practices and introduce each session topic.

Breakout Session 1: Mentoring Junior Faculty: Respect, Responsibilities, and Rewards

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Beth Phillips

Description: This workshop targets Associate and Full Professors and focuses on how to maximize the mutual benefits of mentoring junior faculty in ways that do not sap your energy or very limited time. 

Breakout Session 2: Mentoring Students: Research Personnel Management and Mentoring

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Jennifer Steiner

Description: This session will center on advice and practices for developing an optimal laboratory culture, discussion of best practices for mentoring struggling students, and ways to have a successful collaborative relationship with your student(s). An open discussion of past or present difficulties faculty have faced or are facing will be encouraged, so that solutions can be brainstormed amongst faculty partners. 

Breakout Session 3: How to Be a Good Mentee

Activity Leader(s): Dr. Timothy Baghurst

Description: This session will explore the key qualities of an effective mentee and how to make the most of a mentoring relationship.

Date and Time: January 15, 2027, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Location: In Person

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Activity Leaders: Dr. James Du

Description: During this workshop, Dr. James Du introduces LDA, BERTopic, and lexicon-based sentiment scoring through hands-on activities and examples.

Date and Time: February 12, 2027, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Location: Online

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Activity Leaders: Dr. Sarah Johnson

Description: Research quality can be improved through intentional planning around data integrity, sample management, methodological rigor, and contingency planning. Early-career faculty often encounter unexpected challenges ranging from equipment and freezer failure to data management issues to issues related to research personnel, collaborators, or human research subjects. These challenges can affect research timelines, outcomes, and personal and professional well-being. Dr. Sarah Johnson will provide practical guidance, case scenarios and examples, and best practices and tips that help faculty strengthen research rigor, protect against preventable errors and monitor for unpreventable errors, and learn from common setbacks encountered in academic research environments.

Date and Time: March 12, 2027, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Location: Online

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Activity Leader: Dr. James Du

Description: During this workshop, Dr. James Du demonstrates audio feature extraction and facial-expression recognition pipelines using publicly available models.

Date and Time: April 9, 2027, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Location: Online

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Activity Leaders: Dr. Beth Phillips

Description: This workshop also targets researchers working in P-12 schools of all career levels. The goal is to discuss how to develop and maintain respectful long-term relationships with districts and schools while still maintaining the integrity of research designs (primarily quantitative studies). For the second topic, this workshop is targeted toward mid-career and senior faculty seeking to engage in large-scale research projects, or already doing so, Dr. Beth Phillips and other faculty will discuss how to set up, manage, and successfully publish research from multi-site projects without overly stressful interactions and controversies.

Date & Time: Recurring

Location: In-person or Online

Click here to Register

Activity Leaders: Dr. James Du

Description: Dr. James Du will assist colleagues on study design, model selection, and reviewer-response strategy for NLP-adjacent projects.

Date & Time: Recurring

Location: In-person or Online

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Activity Leaders: Dr. James Du

Description: Dr. James Du will assist with a coordinated initiative across four mutually reinforcing methodological tracks: (1) social-media engagement and sentiment analysis, including platform-native metric extraction, polarity scoring, and emotion-decomposition models; (2) textual sentiment and mining, applied to archives, open-ended survey responses, and policy documents; (3) multimodal NLP, integrating audio feature extraction, facial-expression recognition, and aligned machine-learning pipelines; and (4) topic modeling at scale, deploying both LDA and transformer-based BERTopic for inductive theme discovery in large corpora. Each track will be packaged with reproducible Python notebooks, sample data, and concise conceptual primers tailored to non-technical audiences.

Date & Time: Recurring

Location: In-person or Online

Click here to Register (open to post-doctoral fellows/graduating students)

Activity Leaders: Dr. Beth Phillips

Description: Dr. Beth Phillips will provide pre-submission review of grants. In this way, she could act as a “Red Team” reviewer in the same way that the University Office of Research has assembled faculty to do so. Dr. Beth Phillips is also willing to meet one-on-one with faculty and post-doctoral fellows/graduating students to discuss their ideas for conceptualizing and writing experimental/longitudinal projects. This includes design assistance and related considerations.

Date & Time: Recurring

Location: In-person or Online

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Activity Leaders: Dr. Jennifer Steiner

Description: This session will include a presentation of the grant by the author to a small group for feedback, or reviewing of the written grant document or aims page, by Dr. Jennifer Steiner or other volunteers. Feedback would include stylistic writing and formatting improvements, and analysis of the aims and experiments proposed. Peer review sessions could be coupled with writing workshops if faculty think this would be useful. 

Date & Time: Recurring

Location: In-person or Online

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Activity Leaders: Dr. Timothy Baghurst

Description: Dr. Timothy Baghurst will mentor faculty at various career stages through individualized or small-group consultations, during which he will facilitate their work and serve as a quasi-journal reviewer/editor. These activities will be designed to improve manuscript quality, increase submission and acceptance rates, and support a more productive and collaborative research culture within the College.