Clemson Division of Research

January 2017

Dear Colleagues,

What a wonderful way to start 2017, with a national championship! Congrats to the football team, the coaches and all the other staff and students who made that possible.

Having a national championship is meaningful in so many ways. It boosts the morale for the entire Clemson Family and gives us something to be proud of – especially considering our star quarterback and several other players graduated just weeks before playing their last game. The win can also be inspirational and aspirational.

ClemsonForward set our aspirational goal: to be a major national research university.

Today we are announcing one of the first pieces of the plan to be put into play: more than $1 million in seed grants from the Division of Research to support individual faculty, teams of faculty and to invest in new equipment.

These grants, which will be awarded through a competitive process, will help prepare our research team to be perennial national players, by making us more competitive for research funding, more attractive to our outstanding faculty, staff and students, and more compelling for prospective faculty, staff and students.

The funds will be awarded in five categories:

Clemson Faculty Succeeds positions interdisciplinary faculty teams to successfully compete for significant external funding ($1.5 million or more) that will enhance the stature and distinction of the university in all key areas of research, scholarship and creative activities at Clemson University. It provides seed grants that support leading-edge research and scholarship that capitalizes on the existing intellectual capital at Clemson. Preference is given to projects that are multi-disciplinary, inter-institutional and that advance the ClemsonForward strategic innovation clusters: advanced materials; cyber infrastructure and big data science; energy, transportation and advanced manufacturing; human resilience; health innovation; and the sustainable environment.

The sole goal for each funded CU Faculty Succeeds grant is the successful submission of significant external research proposals.

Clemson Research Fellows provides grants to assist regular faculty, academic departments, centers and institutes in the hiring and training of qualified research faculty and post-doctoral researchers. Researchers may be hired to promote collaborative and creative interdisciplinary activities, research and demonstration projects, build a center or program or pursue a large funding opportunity. These grants may run for a maximum of two years; at the end of the two-year period, the researcher position is expected to be fully supported by the externally funded grants or the department. 

Clemson Major Research Instrumentation provides financial support to researchers for the purchase of major research equipment or to replace or upgrade major research equipment that will likely impact funding, scholarship and research productivity, and the probability of increased extramural funding. The equipment will have a useful life of at least five years and cost more than $50,000.

Clemson Seed provides two tiers of funding support to eligible Clemson faculty in either the initiation of research activities or the completion of a scholarly project or product. Priority consideration is given to faculty who may not have large start-up packages or significant financial research support and resources. Initiation activities can include establishing baseline data, completing a phase of a research project that will lead to greater funding opportunities or developing research partnerships with collaborators at other institutions.

In Tier-1 awards, projects or products for completion can include finalizing peer-reviewed publications, scholarly books, chapters in books, or showings as in the case of the visual and performing arts.

Tier-2 initiation awards must include a proposal to an external funding agency as one of its deliverables. This program replaces the University Research Grants Committee (URGC) proposal call.

NSF Engineering Research Centers awards small grants to assist eligible Clemson faculty teams in pursuit of funding from the National Science Foundation ERC program. Successful proposals will bring together multiple partners engaging in large-scale, long-term innovative, transformative and complex projects. The outcomes of the program are the successful submission of pre-proposals and full proposals, if invited, to the NSF.

For details, guidelines and instructions for applying go to the R-Initiatives web page.

With these initiatives and support, and future components of ClemsonForward, the Tigers football team won’t be the only champions: Clemson will excel and succeed in research and scholarship at the national level.

Go Tigers!

Tanju