Seed fund primes the pump for external support of large-scale research

Vice president’s office makes grants to four faculty groups.

by Scott J. Turner

Four multi-disciplinary research teams received a total of $356,000 in “seed” funds from the Office of the Vice President for Research to gather new data in bioengineering, biomaterials, human development in infancy and childhood, and environmental change.

The new Research Seed Fund program was created to “help faculty obtain external support, principally for large-scale multi-investigator projects and centers,” said Andries van Dam, vice president for research. It is one of several initiatives available from his office to support research endeavors.

“By providing funds to seed new research, we aim to help faculty compete more often and more successfully for the large-scale, multidisciplinary, multi-principal-investigator grants that are becoming increasingly common and that offer opportunities for transformative research and discovery,” he said. Major grants are available from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other external funding sources.

Writing proposals and getting a project funded are extremely time consuming. Research seed funds serve as a faculty incentive system. The program provides for van Dam to make awards of up to $100,000 per project.

“I want to help faculty get proactive about turning up new opportunities and getting them funded,” said van Dam in a George Street Journal interview last fall. “I want to have resources so that a faculty member can come to me with a proposal and say, ‘I could work with so-and-so in another department this summer. If we had another graduate student, we could write a proposal and submit it in the fall.’”

Depending upon the project, this first round of seed funds will be used to hire researchers, purchase equipment and supplies, underwrite graduate tuition or provide postdoctoral support. The four projects were chosen from proposals submitted by groups of faculty investigators.

The recipients are:

• Microsphere-Based Drug Delivery Systems and Hydrogels for the Creation of Cartilage Biocomposites. A Tissue-Engineered Solution to Joint Damage.” Funds totaling $93,920 will ease the way for a new tissue-engineering collaboration among faculty members in clinical medicine, drug delivery, biomaterials, immuno-isolation and morphogenic growth factor research. “Organization of complimentary novel experimental approaches in tissue engineering would put Brown at the cutting edge of regenerative medicine,” said the researchers. Data collected from seed-funded research would be used in 2004 to support NIH and NSF grants. Faculty members involved in the project include Michael J. Lysaght and Edith Mathiowitz from the Center for Biomedical Engineering and Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology; and Roy K. Aaron, M.D., and Deborah McK. Ciombor from the Department of Orthopaedics at Rhode Island Hospital.

• Biomaterials. A total of $99,500 in funding will support two postdoctoral researchers who will work within Brown’s NSF-sponsored Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). One individual will study engineered complex surfaces used in bio-hybrid devices and tissue engineering. The second will conduct research in molecular biomechanics and microfluidics. By expanding the MRSEC and reinforcing University-level support, the seed funds will help better place the MRSEC to compete for NSF funding in 2004. The project involves Clyde Briant, Kenneth Breuer, G. Tayhas R. Palmore and Thomas R. Powers, Division of Engineering; and Diane Hoffman-Kim and Jeffrey R. Morgan, Center for Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology.

• Transient Hearing Loss and Milestones of Language Learning. A grant of $64,000 will be used to examine the incidence and etiology of temporary hearing loss during infancy and its impact on speech perception, production and language-related aspects of cognitive development. The researchers expect that the result from this initial effort will be a five-year longitudinal, multi-disciplinary research project housed within the Center for the Study of Human Development at Brown; a follow-up five-year study would relate hearing loss and language development in infancy to school readiness and early academic performance. The proposal brings together strengths in infant hearing assessment and in infant speech perception, and extends them to the prediction and explanation of productive language and cognitive achievement. The project's five faculty members plan to submit a grant proposal to the NIH before October 2004. Those researchers are James Morgan and Katherine Demuth, Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences; Cynthia Garcia Coll, Department of Education; Michael E. Msall, M.D., Child Development Center at Rhode Island Hospital; and Ronald Seifer, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Center for the Study of Human Development.

• Understanding and Modeling Land Cover-Land Use Change. A total of $98,000 will go toward deepening the understanding of the processes and impacts of land cover and land-use change. These factors are considered the most likely dominant drivers of environmental change over the next 50 to 100 years, yet the understanding of these fundamental processes and their impacts are in their infancy. This project includes a proposal to study eutrophication and hypoxia in Narragansett Bay, designed to strengthen Brown’s estuarine research efforts. Overall, this project is part of an effort at Brown to develop an interdisciplinary research agenda in the field of environmental change. According to the faculty members involved, the anticipated result will be the development of research funding proposals to be submitted to NSF, NASA, NIH and private foundations. Investigators include Jack Mustard and Warren Prell, Department of Geological Sciences; Mark Bertness and Johanna Schmitt, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; and Andrew Foster, Department of Economics.