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A boost to cutting-edge projects
SPRInG hopes seed money will bring forth funding for new research

By David J. Craig

Faculty at BU's Charles River Campus soon will have additional leverage getting fledgling research projects off the ground, thanks to a new grant program being launched this year by Provost Dennis Berkey. The Special Program for Research Initiation Grants (SPRInG) is aimed specifically at assisting interdisciplinary research projects in their early stages.

Provost Dennis Berkey is launching the Special Program for Research Initiation Grants (SPRInG) to help faculty get innovative research ideas off the ground and eventually attain external funding. Associate Provost Carol Simpson is administering the program. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

The Office of the Provost annually will present between 10 and 20 of the one-year grants, which can be as large as $25,000, to researchers whose ideas are deemed most likely to eventually receive external funding and lead to publications. The first round of the prizes will be awarded June 1. The provost is accepting applications for SPRInG through March 15; letters of intent must be received by February 22.

"The purpose of this program is to provide seed funding to faculty who wish to initiate new research projects that require some financial pump-priming at the outset," says Berkey. "We expect that many of the proposals will involve interdisciplinary initiatives, for which departmental or even college funds might not be available. Our hope is that the successful proposals will result in new research activities for which external funding will eventually be won, and from which significant discoveries will issue."

According to Associate Provost Carol Simpson, who is administering the program, SPRInG should help junior faculty members and faculty going into a new area of research. "External funding agencies tend to give money to people who have an established record of being able to do the type of work that they're proposing," she says. "If the proposed project is a very new idea or a complete change of direction for a professor, it's hard to gain the support of funding agencies."

Finding money for interdisciplinary research in its infancy is particularly difficult, says Simpson, partly because many funding agencies do not have special channels for assisting such projects. "At the same time," she says, "a lot of really cutting-edge research is being done on the boundaries of traditional disciplines."

The Office of the Provost expects that researchers who receive the grants will use the money to produce a few preliminary results that demonstrate their ideas are promising, and thereby enable them to secure more funding from external sources. "The intention of the grant is not to fund projects to completion," says Simpson. "It's to put faculty members into a strong position for attaining funding at a larger scale. We fully expect that within 24 months of receiving the award, faculty will submit a fully developed proposal to an external funding agency or private foundation."

All BU faculty at the Charles River Campus who are eligible to be principal investigators can apply for SPRInG awards. Individual faculty or small groups of faculty may apply, and partial funding of proposals is possible. SPRInG will not support projects that have received funding from other sources.

According to literature from the Office of the Provost, SPRInG proposals will be evaluated "primarily on the basis of their innovative and/or interdisciplinary character, potential for furthering interdisciplinary collaborations, and likelihood of achieving external funding." Preference will be given "to faculty members at the beginning of their academic careers who can demonstrate that this is a new research direction, not previously or currently funded elsewhere, and that the research topic crosses traditional discipline boundaries."

Applications for the grants will be reviewed by a panel of BU faculty appointed by the provost, in consultation with the Research Activities and Libraries Committee of the University Council.

18 January 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations