The Office of the Provost received 51 proposals from faculty members seeking seed funding for the 2014-2015 cycle, vice provost for research Martin Wybourne said. The program aims to help tenure-track and research faculty launch new scholarship, research and creativity at Dartmouth.
Wybourne launched the seed funding program in the 2013-2014 academic year while serving as interim provost. Proposals were due on Feb. 2, and recipients are expected to be notified of their proposal status by early spring term.
“The idea is to really fund scholarship and research that is on the cutting edge of new scholarly activities, particularly ones with a collaborative nature where faculty are working with other faculty at different schools or disciplines so it’s really trying to ‘seed’ new faculty activities and ideas,” he said.
Wybourne said that he thinks the seed funding initiative will allow faculty members to start new trials of inquiry, build the College’s research reputation in certain areas and provide faculty — who use federal funding for research — the opportunity to attain the data they require to apply for federal grants.
Currently, the seed funding is split into three separate funding opportunities. Pilot Funds, one-year grants between $10,000 and $50,000, are aimed at supporting primary steps in potentially high-impact projects. Cross-disciplinary Collaboration Funds, which are two-year grants between $50,000 and $200,000, are designated for projects that incorporate faculty from two or more different schools at Dartmouth or two traditionally unrelated subject matters and that aim to address larger, complex problems.
This year, the Office of the Provost added a new funding category specifically for arts, humanities and social sciences faculty, for whom external funding is traditionally sparse. This category of funding gives grants for two years, up to $20,000 total, which can be used to further a faculty member’s scholarly pursuits or artistic projects.
Last year the seed funding program received 40 applications, with a majority of the proposals focused on the sciences, leading Wybourne to consider the additional category.
“I talked to colleagues, and we decided that it may be a good idea to carve out a separate category to make it very clear that this program is meant to support arts and humanities as well as sciences and social sciences,” Wybourne said. “The program is not limited to scientists, and I see this program as a new outlet for arts and humanity faculty members who want to explore new areas of research.”
He said that this year he has seen a significant increase in the number of proposals focused in the arts and humanities.
Faculty members in different disciplines are not excluded from applying to particular funding ranges, Wybourne said. If a project is based in the arts and humanities but faculty involved would like to apply to one of the higher-funded categories, it is acceptable, he said.
Biological sciences professor Eric Schaller, who received seed funding last year, wrote in an email that the program is a prime example how the College can enable research. His and Geisel professor George O’Toole’s project, titled “Ethylene chemotaxis as a basis for mediating bacterial-plant interactions,” focuses on how certain types of bacteria promote plant growth and how those mechanisms can improve agricultural productivity.
He wrote that there are a lot of great scientific ideas out there that can make a real difference in people’s lives, but that the federal government is limited in the funding it has available. This makes it all the more important for colleges and universities to step up and invest in these ideas, he wrote.
Investment in research is a “rising tide that lifts all boats,” Schaller wrote, and the benefits will ripple and affect all aspects of Dartmouth academic life, including undergraduate and graduate studies.
The opportunity to engage in important and meaningful research is fundamental to fostering educational experiences, as well as maintaining the College’s reputation at national and international levels, he wrote. He wrote that the seed funding program promotes cross-departmental collaboration.
Linguistics professor Christiane Donahue, who received seed funding last year for her project “Effects of Globalization on Scholarly Communication: Mapping the Future of Non-Anglophone Writing Research,”
wrote in an email that the initiative allows support for projects that cannot be developed within a regular budget, or those for which regular funding might take so long that the cutting-edge project could lose its cutting edge.
She added that the funding allows creativity and some risk — ideas can be tested and made stronger for larger funding proposals, within Dartmouth or beyond, she wrote.
The money used for seed funding is being drawn from a pool of former costly inefficiencies within the Provost’s Office, Wybourne said, which have since been redirected to budget this activity. This year, the Provost’s Office received a large donation from a donor who expressed interest in seeding “high risk, high reward” projects that are highly innovative and have a “real transformable impact,” Wybourne said.
“We’re willing to review and accept any proposals that come in and meet the criteria,” Wybourne said. “We know how much funding we’ve got, and we try and fund the most worthy proposals. If there are no proposals that meet funding criteria, we don’t feel obliged to fund programs that aren’t very strong.”
Geisel professor Bryan Luikart said that the program allows faculty members to take on projects that any one lab cannot possibly accommodate.
“Science is moving more in that direction, in which we have cluster initiatives and labs working together on a common project, because things are less simple and you need to be able to use a lot of different approaches to difficult questions in science,” Luikart said. “Different labs have different specialities, and if we can get groups working together, then that synergy can mean that the project that goes between those projects can be greater than the sum of its parts.”
Genetics professor Giovanni Bosco, who partnered with Luikart on a seed-funded project titled “Living to 100: Understanding the molecular underpinnings of age-dependent cognitive disorder,” said that the seed funding initiative allows faculty members with creative ideas to get their project jump-started to a certain threshold, at which it may be competitive enough for large federal or private foundation funding.
