Announcing Awards in the TRIAD Seed Grants Program
To encourage multidisciplinary collaborative research and to further expand the external funding to the university’s research, WPI announced the Transformative Research and Innovation, Accelerating Discovery (TRIAD) seed grant program in the fall of 2019. Now 17 multidisciplinary projects have received their funding.
Each project is a new research topic that a newly formed multidisciplinary group of faculty, together with students, will work on for 12-18 months. The awards reflect multidisciplinary collaborations across all schools and departments, and address important problems in STEM.
“It’s been exciting to watch faculty develop these innovative ideas and reach across departments to work with colleagues in new ways,” says President Laurie Leshin. “WPI is known for actively fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among our students on their project teams, and these new grants invest in faculty who share that spirit of collaboration in order to tackle challenges on the forefront of discovery.”
The $60,000 funding for each TRIAD project is divided so each faculty team brings one-third of the funding from their own development funds, associated department heads devote one-third of the funding, and the last one-third comes from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. The funding for the 17 awarded seed grants (over $1M total) comes from returned indirect costs, and the generous contribution of a WPI alumnus and of WPI’s Chair of the Board of Trustees, Jack Mollen. Each project can last up to a year with a possible six-month extension.
