Credit: CEM; OSU.
Ohio State University has issued a request for proposals for its 2011-2012 Materials Research Seed Grant Program. The offering is open to the “OSU materials community.” According to Nitin P. Padture, an OSU professor and founder of the school’s Center for Emergent Materials, these seed grant programs are designed to support new ideas that might have the potential for transformative impact on science and technology.
The announcement explains that this RFP replaces what had been three separate seed programs. The new program “leverages resources and best practices from the seed programs of the Center for Emergent Materials, ENCOMM, and Institute for Materials Research. The result is a unified RFP with three funding tiers designed to achieve the greatest impact for seeding excellence in materials research of varying scopes.”
ENCOMM is OSU’s center for Electronic & Magnetic Nanoscale Composite Multifunctional Materials.
The three funding tiers are:
1. Proto-IRG Grants, which have the “goal of forming new Interdisciplinary Research Groups that could be incorporated into the CEM renewal proposal in 2013.”
2. Multidisciplinary Team Building Grants, which have the goal of “forming multidisciplinary materials research teams that can compete effectively for federal block-funding opportunities.”
3. Exploratory Materials Research Grants, which have the goal of “enabling nascent materials research to emerge to the point of being competitive for external funding.”
The grants include funding for principal and coprincipal investigators and other direct costs.
The complete RFP is available here. The deadline for proposals is 2:00 p.m. Monday May 16, 2011.