The Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing and Libraries (CORCL) provides Multi-Investigator Faculty Research Grants for innovative research projects and pilot studies that team two or more UCI Academic Senate faculty. (See http://www.ap.uci.edu/APP/1-20_titles.html for Senate titles.) The goal of the program is to promote collaborations among faculty members on relatively short-term projects; "high-risk/high-yield" pilot research investigations; and research which may lead to further discoveries and/or large-scale extramural funding. Awards generally range up to $25,000. Award recipients are required to submit a brief final report on findings and expenditures. Faculty from all disciplines are encouraged to apply. Faculty serving on the CORCL as Academic Senate members may not apply for this grant.

Evaluation Criteria:

Teams of two or more UCI Academic Senate members are eligible for awards. Some preference will be given to proposals from faculty who have not previously collaborated with each other, from faculty in different schools, from faculty in different departments in the same school, and from teams that include untenured and tenured professors. These factors are considerations in the committee's decisions; however, the primary absolute condition for an award is that two or more UCI Academic Senate members have significant roles in the research activity.

Proposals will be evaluated in terms of:

Budget:

Multi-Investigator Faculty Research grants may be used for research assistance, materials and equipment not otherwise available, and travel expenses associated with gathering data (travel to conferences is not supported). Administrative support costs should be kept to a minimum. While not encouraged, summer stipends will be considered, but proposers should carefully justify the need for such stipends in their budget requests (e.g., why must the work be done during the summer?).

This grant program is designed to help advance the research of UCI faculty, and, to that end, graduate student researcher support may be requested; however, the program is not intended to support graduate student dissertation research per se.

If equipment is requested, it should be essential to the research. In fields where extramural support is available, it is expected that equipment costs will be shared with the proposer's school or department. A clear explanation to justify an equipment request should be provided in the body of the proposal, and a letter of commitment from the appropriate dean or chair outlining the amount and nature of the matching funds should accompany the request.

Funds are to be expended in accordance with UC and campus policies between October 15 and August 30 of the academic year following the application.

Application Procedures:

CORCL reviewers represent a wide variety of disciplines in the Academic Senate; therefore, proposals should be written as jargon-free as possible. If research involves human or animal subjects, or rDNA, funding will be contingent on approval of the protocol by the IRB, IACUC or IBC. Each proposal package should include, in the following order (no staples please):

A faculty member may be lead on only one proposal, but may be co-investigator on more than one Multi-Investigator grant proposal per competition.

Send original and nine copies of the complete proposal and one additional copy of the abstract to: Michelle AuCoin, Academic Senate Office, 3700 Berkeley Place South, ZOT 1325. Also, send a pdf file of the entire application to maucoin@uci.edu.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is May 1 by 5:00 P.M. (If May 1 falls on a weekend, proposals will be accepted on the following Monday.) Late submissions will not be accepted. CORCL will also not accept proposals from previous CORCL grant recipients who have not submitted final reports. Applicants will be notified by July 1.

Questions About Proposals?