FAST START Workshop Series for Research Support at OSU: Fall 2025 Workshops

This workshop offers a brief overview of art & architecture resources at the OSU Libraries. Join art and architecture librarian Sara Mautino, and library coordinator Amy Hunt, for an introduction to resources relevant to your research. Learn how to get research assistance, view unique materials, and access resources remotely. You'll also learn about the new resources the university has acquired to support visual and design research. 

The Central Sponsored Programs Administration (CSPA) offers a variety of services for faculty, staff, and sponsored programs offices campuswide including grant writing, electronic research administration, and sponsored programs contract review. Dr. Julie Swaringim-Griffin, Assistant Vice President for CSPA, will provide a look into CSPA services and how to access these services to benefit your future proposal submissions and other research activities. 

The Library Catalog was updated in Summer 2025 with a new visual interface, and a more robust set of tools to help locate, manage, and work with scholarly research. This interactive session will help attendees understand how to use the Library Catalog to search for scholarly materials, use filters to refine search results, and use the Account tools to organize and manage citations for journal articles, books, and other resources. 

This workshop will give a brief overview of the purpose of the IACUC and IBC, specifically describing the Animal Welfare Regulations, NIH Guidelines and Biosafety Oversight. It will describe what you can anticipate when you submit a project for review. In the second half of the workshop, the presenters will be available for questions about preparing your own projects for submission. 

Learn about the comprehensive resources available to you from the Office of Technology Commercialization and Cowboy Technologies to protect innovations that spawn from your OSU research and development activities utilizing patents, trade secrets, copyrights or trademarks, and also accelerate innovations to market as commercial products and services that make an impact in the world. You’ll hear about resources that span from intellectual property identification and protection services, commercialization funding opportunities, commercialization education and business mentoring, and others. 

As artificial intelligence systems are being used to remix and share content, it becomes essential to signal usage rights in ways machines can understand. Creative Commons licenses provide a human and machine readable framework authors and creators can use to indicate how they are willing for their works to be reused and distributed by others. AI and CC license signaling refers to ways in which these permissions an be embedded directly into digital content. This session will explore how creators can use Creative Commons metadata and tags to communicate these permissions to humans and AI systems, helping ensure interactions are in line with copyright and the principles of open practices. 

Undergraduate researchers can be a vibrant and valuable addition to your research program. Learn the many ways to engage OSU undergraduates in your work and why you should consider becoming a mentor. We will also introduce funding and support systems for undergraduate researchers. Programs include the Freshman Research Scholars, Wentz and Purdie Research Scholars, Niblack Research Scholars, the AURCA program, and McNair Scholars. 

Join faculty and staff from the Proteomics and Genomics Core Facility, NGS Core Facility, the Microscopy Facility, the NMR Facility and Animal Resources for an overview of these major research facilities administered and/or supported by the Division of the Vice President for Research. Personnel will describe relevant services, fees, forms, and other useful information for their facility and there will be time for Q&A at the end of the panel. 

OSU has a variety of resources to support faculty members with their grant proposals, including an online database to search for and identify funding opportunities, in-person grant proposal writing workshops, a writing tool to ensure the originality of your written work (and protect your scholarly reputation), a workshop series to promote the ethical and responsible conduct of research, and proposal writing consultants. We also have a few internal grant programs. This session will cover all of these resources that are available for FREE to OSU faculty members. 

This workshop will give a brief overview of the purpose of the IRB and describe what you can anticipate when you submit a project for review. In the second half of the workshop, the presenters will be available for questions about preparing your own projects for submission. 

OSU Libraries are known for the plethora of services and resources they offer to our campus community. But did you know that many of the services and resources can be accessed online and from a distance? We invite students, instructors, and faculty to explore the various Library services and resources available to them online, as well as services and resources specific to our distance education community. During this session, we will review access to reference resources and opportunities for online research support, instruction, and help when needed.

This session may be helpful for: Undergraduate students, graduate students, concurrent enrollment students, instructors, & faculty. 

Transform your research question into a comprehensive search strategy, whether you're navigating academic databases for the first time or looking to perfect your search methodology. You'll learn the process of translating complex research questions into effective search terms, then master advanced techniques to maximize your results across multiple platforms. While we'll primarily use the Scopus database, we'll also explore how to expand your reach through specialized databases and grey literature sources that others often miss. We'll also briefly explore emerging AI-powered tools that are reshaping how researchers discover and organize academic literature. By the end of this session, you'll have a practical toolkit to conduct thorough, efficient searches that strengthen any research project. 

This session will overview the services and oversight provided by units within University Research Compliance. Join Gina Cosden and Brandon Jordan to hear more about how OSU handles Conflicts of Interest and Radiation & Laser safety and how these offices can help you maintain research compliance. This panel will also discuss National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM)-33, which has implications for researchers who need to disclose conflicts of interest.  

Learn tips for designing an effective research poster. What size should it be? What fonts should you use? What are the best practices for pictures and graphs? Find out answers to these questions and also learn about the library's free poster printing service. 

The 360° Critical Skills for Career Success professional development program is designed to give graduate students a framework for approaching their professional development. Join Dr. Carol Powers, Assistant Dean of the Graduate College, for this session to learn more about the structure of the program, the range of programming offered and get a glimpse of the many activities we have planned for the coming academic year.  

Zotero is a useful (and free!) tool for managing bibliographies and references, allowing individuals and research teams to collect and share citations more efficiently. This workshop will introduce participants to the basics of using Zotero, which will include creating and adding references to a library, organizing and managing citations, and using Zotero with Microsoft Word and Google Docs for in-text citations and bibliographies. 

The Carpentries is a global, volunteer-led organization whose mission is to introduce researchers to coding and computing. The Carpentries at OSU has been teaching regular workshops on such tools as Python, R, SQL, Git, OpenRefine and Unix Shell since 2015. Workshops are free and taught for participants with no prior experience. In this introductory workshop we will describe the Carpentries teaching philosophy, provide examples of how the different tools are applied, as well as share tentative plans for fall workshop offerings. The OSU Carpentries community is active and growing. Come find out how you can be a part of it and if it is a good fit for you or for your students. 

The first part of this workshop will detail how to search ScienceDirect, Scopus, and IEEE for engineering topics. This will include expanding a topic for a literature review, creating keyword alerts, and placing references in Zotero. The second part of this workshop will focus on searching for and locating technical standards. Engineers and scientists rely on technical standards to provide definitions and explanations. What are technical standards? Where are they found? What is the role of a standards provider such as IHS Markit? In this workshop you will increase your subject knowledge of standards and answer the basics related to these technical documents. 

As part of Oklahoma State University’s modern land-grant mission, our faculty are encouraged to disseminate their knowledge to the general public. One way OSU accomplishes that is by providing media access to interview faculty as expert sources. This session will cover tips and tricks on how to work with media and the resources available to you within your college and the Department of Brand Management. 

Join faculty and staff from the Immunopathology Core, Molecular Biology and Genomics Core, and Animal Models Core for an overview of these major research facilities administered and/or supported by the Oklahoma Center for Respiratory and Infectious Diseases (OCRID). Personnel will describe relevant services, fees, forms, and other useful information for their facility and there will be time for Q&A at the end of the panel.