Pitt Momentum Funds
In the 2019–2020 academic year, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Ann E. Cudd and Senior Vice Chancellor for Research (SVCR) Rob A. Rutenbar have collaborated to enhance and streamline internal funding opportunities for faculty research while continuing to support high-quality research, scholarship, and creative endeavors.
The result is a jointly funded large-scale research development fund—the Pitt Momentum Funds—which restructures the University's suite of internal funding programs (Central Research Development Fund, Social Science Research Initiative, and Special initiative to Promote Scholarly Activities in the Humanities) and adds a new SVCR/Provost Fund to provide allocations for research seeding, teaming, and scaling grants.
The new $920,000 annual funding model provides large-scale, transformative scholarship support for interdisciplinary teams of faculty from at least three schools with two new one-year planning (or "teaming") grants of $60,000, and two new two-year scaling grants at $400,000. This new suite of funds—which is new funding and does not reduce overall funding—will help advance Pitt's goal to engage in research of impact.
The new structure for awards includes three tiers:
Seeding Grants—one-year term with an award cap of $16,000 plus ($2,000 supplements are available for specific cases); awards are made in four tracks:
Health & Life Science
Social Sciences, which includes business, policy, law, education, and social work
Preventing Sexual Misconduct** (All faculty, including School of Medicine, are eligible to apply to this track)
Seeding grants support significant and innovative scholarship by individual or groups of faculty at all ranks at the University of Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on early career faculty and areas where external funding is extremely limited.
Teaming Grants—one-year term with an award cap of $60,000. Teaming grants support the formation of new multi-disciplinary collaborations to successfully pursue large-scale external funding.
Scaling Grants—two-year term with an award cap of $400,000. Scaling grants enable multi-disciplinary teams to competitively scale their research efforts in targeted pursuit of large-scale external funding.
More information on eligibility, application processes, evaluation criteria, exclusions, and participation requirements is available through Pitt's Office of Sponsored Programs. The application can be accessed at the Competition Space.
**Pitt Momentum Funds: Preventing Sexual Misconduct grants will support research that has the potential to positively impact efforts at all of the University of Pittsburgh campuses. Funds in this category are new and enhance the total funding available through the Pitt Momentum Funds. All faculty, including School of Medicine, are eligible to apply to the Preventing Sexual Misconduct track.