Searching for just-the-right external funding opportunity—a grant, fellowship, or other award--that you are eligible for, and that aligns with your research, teaching, education, or service goals—can be difficult and time consuming. So too can be finding a complimentary scholar to collaborate with on your projedct. For OIe Miss employees and students, UM’s Pivot-RP and Research Insight subscriptions can make this process easier and more fruitful. Pivot-RP is a comprehensive, searchable database of funding opportunities and U.S. scholar profiles that covers all academic and discipline areas. 

 

To access Pivot-RP,  login using the University of Mississippi’s credentials (Shibboleth—your WebId and password). If this is your first time to access PIVOT-RP, you will first need to Create an Account, after which you will be prompted to Claim (and update) your Scholar Profile that the company has already created for you based on information it found on the Internet. If you are a student or don’t yet have a pre-fabricated Scholar Profile, you can Create one (or just skip this step to get started searching for opportunities). 

 

If you are a faculty member, your profile can contain biographical information about your role, affiliations, publications, grants, and more. By having your biographical information current and your research interests identified, the tool’s algorithm can do a better job of matching funding opportunities to you, or of helping other researchers to discover you as a potential collaborator.

 

Most successful Pivot-RP users don’t just wait around to be recommended by an algorithm, though. They take the next step and build custom searches by entering keywords or search strings, or selecting from other searchable attributes, such as funder type, award type, applicant type, award amount, activity location, and more.

 

Building the perfect search can be an iterative process, and may require some practice, finesse, and yes, help. The ORSP Research Development Team (orspresdev@olemiss.edu), in coordination with your assigned Research Administrator, can provide that help, from getting started using your account, to building advanced searches, or even building searches on your behalf. We are also happy to give a presentation or tutorial to your class, department, or small group. We’ve also created a few dozen curated funding searches around topics of general interest, ranging from addiction to neuroscience (https://research.olemiss.edu/CuratedFundingOps). 

If you prefer to learn on your own, we recommend as a reference the Pivot-RP YouTube channel (https://research.olemiss.edu/CuratedFundingOps), which has lots of short instructional videos for beginners and advanced users.