Earlier this fall, the Office of the Vice President for research at the University of South Carolina launched two new research funding programs. Excel and the Research Institutes Funding Program (RIFP) offer unprecedented resources and opportunities to faculty at Carolina to encourage research across both underrepresented and typically prominent disciplines at the university.
The Excel Funding Program for Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences will provide funding for these subject areas, which are typically less represented in research funding and grants. Tenured or tenure-track faculty members on the Columbia campus and two-year Palmetto College campuses who specialize in the liberal arts, humanities and social sciences can now apply for this program that will provide up to $25,000 for scholarship and creative work in the arts.
The Excel program is funded through the university’s offices of the President, Provost and Vice President for Research and will award grants to competitive individual faculty projects as well as collaborative projects. Those awarded grants can receive up to $15,000 for individual work of one faculty member or up to $25,000 for collaborative projects involving two or more faculty members.
The RIFP is the largest one-time internal funding program at UofSC, aiming to invest $10 million over four years to establish five new research institutes. The program, created by the Office of the Vice President for Research in partnership with the Office of the President, seeks to promote high-impact interdisciplinary research projects at Carolina, with up to five start-up research institutes receiving as much as $500,000 in annual funding for up to four years.
RIFP funding is available to groups of at least three or more tenured and tenure-track faculty investigators working at the Columbia campus or the schools of medicine in Columbia or Greenville. The primary investigators leading the new institutes will also receive guidance and mentorship from senior Carolina faculty members who have successfully funded and managed major federal research centers.
These complementary new programs have been carefully designed to fund a wide array of scholarly projects. The fact that the institution is home to outstanding faculty ready to make significant impacts in both the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, and poised to earn major federal funding for center grants is a testament to the diversity of research and scholarship at the University of South Carolina.
“As a flagship research institution, our university must support scientific research that leads to technical innovations as well as endeavors that make the world more humane and enlightened,” said Julius Fridriksson, Vice President for Research. “These programs have the potential to bring great work already being done to the next level.”
Both programs have an application deadline coming up on Tuesday, November 15, 2022. Interested eligible faculty can find the requests for proposals for the Excel and RIFP programs on their respective web pages.