About Collaboration Selection and Funding
Below are some questions about how our collaborations were selected and funded. If you have additional inquiries or just want to learn about the Incubator in more detail, we’d love to chat or meet with you. Feel free to contact co-directors William Acree or Betsy Sinclair directly.
The Incubator funded nine multiyear research and learning clusters, as well as five programmatic grants.
The majority of clusters will be funded for a three-year period. A few select clusters will receive 18 months of funding.
Programmatic grants will be funded for a period of up to 18 months, beginning Dec. 2022, with a focus on developing workshops, symposia, conferences, or events around their theme during that time. It is possible that programmatic grants may develop into a cluster in the next funding cycle.
Not all clusters or programmatic grants will receive the same amount of funding; funding will be appropriate for the scope and needs of each proposal.
We recognize that multiyear clusters have different funding requirements for their development and success, which may include post-doctoral research support, travel components, site visits, equipment or data sets, data or technology support and infrastructure, course development for cluster-related classes, and more. Funding per cluster ranges up to $350,000 for the three-year period.
Clusters and programmatic grant teams consist of faculty from at least three distinct units at the university and may include undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral fellows. Teams are encouraged to include external partners (local, national, or international) as well. Faculty Leads (PIs)—of which there must be at least two—should be tenure-track or research faculty whose primary appointment is in A&S. Clusters are also encouraged to include Teaching, Research, and Practice faculty and team members who hold joint appointments or primary positions in other Washington University schools.
The overarching goal of the Incubator is to enable bold and transformative research via new collaborative relationships. Whether the questions addressed in these research collaborations are use-inspired, application-oriented, or grounded in basic research, critical to cluster research is a hypothesis for how a new collaborative team could converge upon new discoveries.
Programmatic grant teams will host conferences, symposia, art installations, performances and community-building events around their select transdisciplinary theme.
Please visit our site regularly for news about our collaborators’ achievements and updates on our next funding cycle.