The Office of the Vice President of Research (OVPR) recently announced the winners of the Spring 2024 OVPR Seed Grant Program. This round marks the 10th cycle of the internal seed grant program, with the OVPR awarding $1 million in total funding to 20 research projects.
OVPR received 72 applications from across Stony Brook University, including the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Renaissance School of Medicine, the School of Health Professions, the College of Business, and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.
The OVPR Seed Grant Program gives Stony Brook University faculty a competitive edge in securing external research funds by offering support for preliminary work that will lead to larger, more competitive, and more impactful research projects. Faculty submitted an abstract and a brief proposal, including a timeline that demonstrated how this seed funding would help cultivate their proposed research into a project that is highly competitive for extramural funding. A team of faculty reviewers assessed the proposals using standardized criteria to determine the proposals’ likelihood of success in acquiring extramural funding. Proposed projects could be proof of concept, feasibility studies, or the development of collaborative interdisciplinary research projects. Since 2018, the OVPR has invested approximately $7.4 million in promising research proposals led by SBU faculty through the OVPR Seed Grant Program.
“These types of internal grant programs are essential to enable the faculty to develop new research directions, new collaborations, increase their competitiveness, and for Stony Brook to become the research university it aspires to be,” said Kevin Gardner, the vice president for Research. “It is one of the important ways that we support the overall research environment here at Stony Brook.”
With 20 awards made this cycle, the Spring 2024 OVPR Seed Grant Program awarded 27.7 percent of the applications received. Among the diverse recipients are a pathologist enhancing their understanding of the upstream regulatory mechanism of a drug targeting metastatic prostate cancer, a marine scientist improving the process of removing toxic per and polyfluorinated substances from the nation’s water supply, and a marketing specialist exploring how subtle manifestations of wealth inequality impact children’s beliefs of their own socioeconomic status.
Shubham Jain from the Department of Computer Science expressed the anticipation of beginning her research saying, “The seed grant will be instrumental in fostering our recent collaboration with Speech Pathology to enable alternative communication modalities. We’re excited because the preliminary results from this research will strengthen our chances of obtaining external funding.”
“Thanks to the OVPR Seed grants, I can explore new avenues in atomic and molecular physics. This funding opportunity also helps me establish solid grounds for future funding applications,” said Jesus Perez Rios from the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Last but not least, thanks to this funding opportunity, I can keep mentoring students and helping them travel to conferences.”
For more information about the awarded proposals, visit the Spring 2024 Seed Grant Award Winners page on the Office of Proposal Development website.
The next OVPR Seed Grant Program Cycle will be announced in August 2024 with a tentative deadline later this fall. Applications for this upcoming cycle will be submitted through InfoReady, a new internal competition software that will streamline the submission and review process. For more information about the OVPR Seed Grant Program and upcoming cycles of funding, visit the Office of Proposal Development’s website.
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