Seed Funding Program

About the OSU Materials Research Seed Grant Program

An aggressive Seed Funding program complements the research structured under the IRGs by providing an agile support mechanism for the very latest developments in materials research, and by identifying and nurturing future leaders in the field. This allows the CEM to have an impact beyond the IRGs membership.

The CEM is one of three partners in the OSU Materials Research Seed Grant Program. This integrated seed program, open to the entire materials research community at The Ohio State University, was started in 2010 to jointly leverage the resources of CEM, the Center for Exploration of Novel Complex Materials (ENCOMM), and the Institute for Materials Research (IMR). The result is a unified program with three Funding Tiers designed to achieve the greatest impact for seeding excellence in materials research of varying scopes.

The three Funding Tiers are:

1. Proto-IRG Grants, which provide funds up to $100,000/year per award in direct costs, and require one Principal Investigator (PI) and two Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs), and may have unfunded collaborators, with the goal of forming new Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs) that could be incorporated into the CEM renewal proposal in 2013.

2. Multidisciplinary Team Building Grants, which provide funds up to $60,000/year per award in direct costs, and require one PI and one Co-PI, and may have unfunded collaborators, with the goal of forming multidisciplinary materials research teams that can compete effectively for federal block-funding opportunities.

3. Exploratory Materials Research Grants, which provide funds up to $40,000/year per award in direct costs, and require one PI, and may have Co-PIs and/or unfunded collaborators, with the goal of enabling nascent materials research to emerge to the point of being competitive for external funding.

Proto-IRG Awards 2012

2012-2013 Seed Funding Program RFP

  • Roberto Myers, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, “Thermal spintronics: materials for enhanced heat-spin interactions”
  • Michael Poirier, Department of Physics, “Functional dynamics of DNA scaffolded materials”
  • Josh Goldberger, Department of Chemistry, “Band structure engineering on Si/Ge/Sn graphene analogues”

Proto-IRG Awards 2011

2011 OSU Materials Research Seed Grant Program awards, including project abstracts

  • Roberto Myers, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, “Thermal Spintronics: Engineering Spin Currents and Dissipation”
  • Michael Paulaitis, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, “Characterization & Synthesis of Mimetic Cell-Secreted Exosomes for Cell Signaling”
  • Michael Poirier, Department of Physics, “Magnetic  Resonance Studies of Chromatin Dynamics and Function”

Seed Awards 2010

The area targeted for the 2010 Strategic Interest grants was PROTO-IRGs.

  • Roberto Myers, Department of Materials Science & Engineering “Thermal Spintronics: Engineering Spin Currents and Dissipation”
  • Michael Poirier, Department of Physics, “Magnetic  Resonance Studies of Chromatin Structure and Dynamics”

Seed Awards 2009

The area targeted for the 2009 Strategic Interest grants was HYBRID MATERIALS.

  • Roberto Myers, Department of Materials Science & Engineering “Towards Room Temperature Spin-Injection/Detection in Wide Band Gap Semiconductors”
  • Jessica Winter, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Co-PI R. Sooryakumar, Department of Physics, “Multifunctional Hybrid Nanomaterials: Synthesis and Manipulation”
  • Renewal of Yi Zhao, Department of Biomedical Engineering “Microstructured Polymer Nanofibers for Skeletal Muscle Restoration”
  • Renewal of Michael Poirier, Department of Physics “Heterogeneous Magnetic Particles for Force and Torque Sensing: A New Approach for Single Molecule Biology”

Seed Awards 2008

The area targeted for the 2008 Strategic Interest grants was BIOMATERIALS.

  • Gunjun Agarwal, Department of Biomedical Engineering, “Magnetic Force Microscopy of Magnetic Nanoparticles in Biological Systems”
  • Michael Poirier, Department of Physics “Heterogeneous Magnetic Particles for Force and Torque Sensing: A New Approach for Single Molecule Biology”
  • Yi Zhao, Department of Biomedical Engineering “Microstructured Polymer Nanofibers for Skeletal Muscle Restoration”
  • Roberto Myers, Department of Materials Science & Engineering “Rare-earth (Gd) Doped Wide Bandgap Semiconductors for Magnetoelectronics”