Melanie Bauer, M.A.

Biography

Melanie Bauer is the NSU Grant Writing Manager, working in the Grant Writing Lab under the central NSU research department known as the Division of Research and Economic Development (DoR). She supports faculty and professional staff through all proposal development stages—finding funding, project ideation and scoping, enhancement of proposal drafts, and revision and resubmission of unfunded proposals. She also supports other aspects of research capacity building at the university, including trainings, communications, and strategic planning.

Previously, she served as Assistant Director of a STEM education lab at Yale University, where she conducted both research and program evaluation studies, as well as managed over $3.5 million in grant-funded projects supported by NSF, NIH, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The focus of the lab was to investigate undergraduate learning in STEM courses and better understand what aspects of teaching lead to student success, leading to publications in education and evaluation journals.

In one year there, she wrote 10 grants—some awarded, many not!—caught the “grant bug,” and was thrilled to join NSU where she is now immersed in the grant world full time. Since joining NSU, she has supported faculty to win awards from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and other public and private funders.

A notable success is that Ms. Bauer is the PI on two current National Science Foundation grant awards totaling $400,000, investigating how to support faculty researchers engaged in team science and early in their careers.

She hopes to support other PIs at NSU in their research and program endeavors to win awards from federal, state, foundation, and other funders. And she encourages you to reach out to her with a project idea to discuss ways to get it funded.