Seven grants totaling $405,000 were awarded in January by the Office of the Vice President for Research through the annual Seed Fund Award. Established in 2003, the seed fund supports "activities necessary to advance large-scale, interdisciplinary, multi-investigator proposals, such as collecting preliminary data and facilitating collaboration," according to the office's Web site.
Seed fund grants, which provide up to $100,000 for one year of research, can be awarded to professors regardless of rank and senior lecturers in any discipline. Applicants are selected on the basis of the project's "intrinsic merit," potential impact, likelihood of successful completion and potential to secure external funding after the first year.
Winners of the award told The Herald that their interdisciplinary research would not have been possible without the grant money.
Kenneth Wong, professor of education, is performing a study of chemistry programs in countries that outperform the United States at the high-school level. "What we are going to find will have some broad implications for urban schools. We will be able to make recommendations to urban educators and policy makers," he said. "(The) seed fund allowed us to cross disciplines. That is the nature of this project, since we are engaging physical and social sciences."
Without the seed money, Wong said his project would have had difficulty getting off the ground, because most external funding is contingent on having concrete data already collected and is often restricted to a single discipline.
"Because of the size of the grant, we are able to perform the study in several countries at the same time and are able to tap into international databases. The seed money allowed us to accelerate the pace of this research, so that by the end of this project year we will be able to apply for external funding," Wong said.
Assistant Professor of Medical Science Alexander Brodsky is researching the potential for Vitamin D to kill ovarian cancer cells by exposing cells to microwave radiation treatments and measuring for responses to this therapy. "What we do is we inject a mouse with a compound to make it grow a tumor, collect samples at various points and study the samples to try to understand what the effects of the microwaves were," he said.
"The (seed fund award) gave an opportunity for us to do experiments, which will let us get external funding. To get external funding, you must (already) have data to show that the research is working. We want to do studies in humans in the longer run, for which we will need external funding," Brodsky said.
Professor of Biology David Rand, who applied for a grant to study nanoparticle toxicity in animals, would also not have been able to proceed without the seed fund program. Rand wrote in an e-mail to The Herald, "With a positive result from the seed fund project ... we can put together a strong proposal to (the National Science Foundation). Without the seed fund results, such a proposal would be rejected as a 'fishing expedition.' So, the value of the seed funds is to allow us to carry out the 'fishing expedition' and deliver some tasty 'fish' to NSF ... for serious multi-year funding."
