Ten proposals of the 51 submitted were awarded seed funding from the Office of the Provost, the College announced last week. Funding for the 10 projects will go toward purchasing necessary equipment, financially supporting team members and running experiments to see if the project could potentially work.
The seed funding program was started in the 2013-2014 academic year under the direction of then-interim provost Martin Wybourne, who is currently the vice provost for research.
“I involved 20 faculty members in the review process,” he said. “We had an incredibly difficult time deciding which ones to fund because of the quality [of the applications]. It was a great problem to have.”
This year, the Provost’s Office received an anonymous gift from an unidentified donor, allowing more innovative projects that may not have been funded otherwise. This allowed almost $450,000 to be awarded in funding for these “high risk, high reward” projects, the College reported.
“We’re not funding incremental research,” Wybourne said. “We want to help faculty that want to explore a new avenue.”
Proposals were selected with the goal of building the College’s reputation in mind, Wybourne said. The criteria included the quality of the proposal, the probability it will succeed even though it is high-risk and the likelihood that the funding will lead to future grants from other outside institutions. Wybourne also stated that having an undergraduate component was a consideration.
“It is allowing faculty to take risks in their scholarships that more traditional funding sources wouldn’t allow,” Wybourne said, adding that the funding might “kick-start” faculty projects.
The seed funding programs has three categories. Pilot Funds, one-year grants ranging from $10,000 to $50,000, are designed to support new directions of inquiry with potentially high-impact projects. Cross-disciplinary Collaboration Funds, two-year grants between $50,000 to $200,000 total, target cooperative projects that connect faculty from two or more schools at Dartmouth or two subject areas that are traditionally unrelated in addressing complex societal questions.
Starting in the 2014-2015 academic year, the Office of the Provost introduced a new funding category for arts, humanities and social sciences faculty, for whom it has typically been difficult to secure outside funding. This two-year grant provides up to $20,000 and is aimed at innovative projects that advance scholarly or artistic development.
Last year, the program received 40 proposal submissions, most of which were science-related, Wybourne said.
“We certainly do not have a quota system,” Wybourne said. “When we reviewed last year’s program, we realized we really needed to target humanities and arts and that’s why we added a new specific category.”
These projects, many interdisciplinary and interdepartmental, also include collaboration across schools.
Classics professor Pramit Chaudhuri is working with Joseph Dexter, an old acquaintance and Ph.D. student studying systems biology at Harvard University, to use the funding to advance classics research methods. Their project, “Computational Analysis of Intertextuality in Classical Literature,” is at the intersection of biology, computer science and classics in its aim to refine and test computational tools for classicists to study the relations between texts and the context arisen from cultural traditions.
“We want to make the barrier to entry as low as possible,” Dexter said.
In order to do so, Chaudhuri and Dexter hope to recruit a full-time professional programmer. Chaudhuri noted that these computational tools needed to be intuitive to ease the process of classics analysis. Seed funding has made this endeavor financially feasible, he said.
Thayer engineering professor Solomon Diamond and biology professor Michael Hoppa’s project “Magnetic Nanoparticle Tags for Remotely Interfacing with Neuronal Circuits” will address the limitations of studying neural functions at the circuit level. Diamond said he plans to work with Hoppa’s optogenetics technique to create a research tool for studying neurons at the intermediate scale.
“The [program] incentivizes faculty to collaborate on new ideas in ways that are very difficult to pursue without support,” Diamond said. “[Hoppa] and I connected really only because of this opportunity.”
Priyanka Nadar, a Thayer School graduate student who has been working with Diamond for the past three years, said she wasexcited about the potential impact of the project on the scientific community.
“It will be revolutionary,” she said. “It will have crazy implications for the field as a research tool forfundamental and clinical neuroscience.”
Geisel professor Sarah Lord said that the funding program is supporting projects that could have a meaningful impact on Dartmouth students.
Anthropology professor Elizabeth Carpenter-Song and computer science professors Andrew Campbell and Lorie Loeb and the Neukom DALI Lab will work on “HealthMatters: Mobile Phone and Location-Based Systems Promoting Resilience and Healthy Lifestyles,” which will focus on tackling student sleep and stress problems through digital innovations. Preliminary ideas include having stations that send stress level surveys to nearby phones, Lordsaid.
“The funding that each of us got really is to support students,” Lordsaid.
Music professor Ashley Fure will work on the development of a series of kinetic sound art objects in a project called “Seven Stages: An Electroacoustic Object Opera.”
Art history professor Katie Hornstein received funding for “Manufactured Desire: Industrial Exhibitions in 19th-Century France.” Geography professor Frank Magilligan received funding for “Smart Cameras Meet Smart Rocks: Quanitfying Stream Channel Responses to Natural and Human-Induced Disturbances” and English professor Andrew McCann received funding for “Theory of the Middlebrow: Market Technologies, Media Networks and Their Discontents.”
Physics professor Chandrasekhar Ramanathan will work on “Magnetic Resonance Characterization of Hyperfine Interactions in Graphene Spintronics” and sociology professor Emily Walton will work on “Urban Multiethnic Neighborhood Stability and Health.” Psychological and brain sciences professor Thalia Wheatley and Tuck School of Business professor Adam Kleinbaum will team up to work on “The Spread of Ideas from Brain to Network.”
Proposals were due on Feb. 2 for projects starting in the summer of 2015.
Correction appended: May 1, 2015
The quote“The funding that each of us got really is to support students,” was originally attributed to Loeb. It was Lord who said the quote. The Dartmouth regrets this error.
