Faculty Innovation Fund helps meet 21st Century challenges
The Challenge
The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences empowers its diverse faculty and staff to innovate, discover and push the frontiers of knowledge to address critical research and education needs, inspire students and alumni, and improve our communities. Our faculty are recruited from throughout the world and collaborate with colleagues across multiple disciplines to solve some of society’s biggest challenges.
The Solution
To retain and meet the research needs of our faculty, we propose creating a $5 million endowment to provide seed grants that support college faculty who are addressing priorities outlined in the college strategic plan. The priority themes of the strategic plan include: sustainable agriculture and food security; equitable development for healthy communities; climate change science and policy; integrated water sciences; informatics, remote sensing and spatial modeling; and disease dynamics in a changing world.
The Philanthropic Opportunity
The Faculty Innovation Fund would support promising and inspiring research ideas proposed by faculty. Funded projects may explore a new idea or process, build a prototype, take an existing homegrown concept to the next level or may be used in any number of creative ways. Emphasis will be placed on value-creating opportunities and addressing known challenges.
Smaller grants would be awarded to single-investigator, single-discipline projects, while larger grants would become available for multidisciplinary projects involving collaborating teams. Projects would offer a clear plan for building long-term research and outreach and emphasize research with potential for broad progress in priority areas. Proposed research also would connect findings to policy and potential action by stakeholders.