Dear Colleagues:
The Office of Research, Innovation, and Economic Development has issued its call for proposals for an important new program, the Game-Changing Research Incentive Program (GRIP) at https://research.ncsu.edu/rdo/funding/internal-funding/grip/ I am writing to urge that you consider leading or joining a team to apply for this funding. This is an exciting program, made even more compelling with the participation of RTI International, and the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science.
GRIP will, in the words of the announcement, “allocate more than $1,500,000 over three years to fund exceptional research teams and projects that span NC State colleges. GRIP is intended to incentivize and support visionary research ideas that will result in large-scale extramural funding, award-winning research impacts, and first-class interdisciplinary graduate education and training.”
In my discussions with senior leadership in ORIED, I have learned that they actively seek our college’s participation—and, indeed, our leadership—in these research teams. They have made very clear to the research community that single-discipline projects will not be funded, nor will continuations or incremental improvements on existing work. They are looking for novel, potentially transformative proposals that will likely yield extramural support, enhance graduate recruitment and training, and will break new ground. They will not fund projects that propose to tack on humanists or social scientists—or, for that matter, any disciplines—for the sake of superficial interdisciplinarity. Instead, substantive interdisciplinarity will be necessary in order to achieve the goals set out in winning proposals.
I believe we can approach this program in a manner similar to the way in which we have developed cluster proposals: scholars in our college work with colleagues in other colleges to find common points of interest that require a consciously interdisciplinary approach. And, indeed, to the extent that these projects address the “grand challenges of society,” they will likely need the expertise we offer to make these projects successful. Such groups may be preexisting, and others may emerge as a result of the stimulus created by the GRIP initiative.
With this in mind, here’s a short checklist of things to do to submit a proposal for the GRIP competition.
- Visit the GRIP site. On that site, you will be able to view the full RFP.
- Contact me if you plan to make a submission. In particular, a short email about your idea would be very useful. Let me know if you have already started forming a team with other colleges—or if need help in doing so.
- Join the webinar on GRIP detailed in another post on this blog. The webinar is on Thursday, March 3, from noon to 1:00 pm.
- Plan to submit a two-page preproposal to the program, with a copy to me, no later than 5 pm on May 31, 2016. Please read the instructions in the RFP and follow them carefully.
- If your proposal is one of the ten pre-proposals that are selected, your team will work to develop a full proposal that will be due on or before June 30, 2016.
Please contact me at any time if you have any questions about this program. This is a signature program of this university and our new Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation, and Economic Development, and it’s an opportunity to which we should energetically respond. I’m ready to assist in any way I can.
