Fall Competition aims to set standard for research excellence
Requests for 2015-2016 research support for the Fall Competition must be submitted to the Graduate School by Friday, Sept. 19.
UW–Madison researchers are being encouraged to apply for competitive funding through the Fall Competition sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education (VCRGE).
Through the competition — a tradition that spans almost a century — the vice chancellor’s office aims to set high standards for research excellence. The competition offers increasing funding opportunities for cutting-edge faculty research and graduate student support.
Funding for the Fall Competition comes from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which was created in 1925 to help commercialize technology arising from UW–Madison research. Since then, WARF has provided the university with more than $1.36 billion for research, programs and initiatives.
“WARF’s generous support for the Fall Competition and for many other initiatives of UW–Madison gives our university a significant margin of excellence that propels innovation, creativity and discovery by faculty, students and staff,” says Marsha Mailick, incoming interim vice chancellor for research and graduate education.
Each year, four research committees representing UW–Madison’s faculty divisions — Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Studies, and the Arts and Humanities — review nearly 600 research proposals from 120 different departments and distribute more than $11 million to more than 400 faculty members for single and multi-investigator research.
In addition to the traditional Fall Competition, for the second year this spring, the Office of the VCRGE will coordinate the Interdisciplinary Research Competition — an effort to foster innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts and/or theories from two or more divisions or bodies of specialized knowledge.
Both competitions use faculty decision making to put critically needed resources in the hands of faculty and staff and are almost unprecedented nationally in size and scope.
All requests for 2015-2016 research support for the Fall Competition must be submitted electronically to the Graduate School by 4:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 19, 2014. Information on the Interdisciplinary Research Competition will be forthcoming.
