The Center for Language Science can provide financial support to stimulate collaborative research by providing seed funding of $500-$2,500 per project in 2019-2020. There will be another round in 2020-2021. The total budget is $17,500 for 2019-2020 and $17,500 for 2020-2021). These funds have been generously provided by the College of Liberal Arts.
These seed funds are meant to encourage and support collaborative research among CLS faculty members and to provide support for the development of new and innovative research projects aimed at attracting external funding.
More specifically, the seed funding grants are meant to enable pilot studies which can be used to inform and increase competitiveness of external grant proposals. The focus is on developing and strengthening collaborative research between CLS faculty. For this reason, teams should be led by two or more CLS tenure track faculty or CLS faculty with continuing multi-year appointments (although external collaborators or non-tenured researchers may be part of the team).
- Seed funding proposals range from $500-$2,500 per project.
- A proposal is submitted by (minimally) two researchers who are CLS tenure track faculty or CLS faculty with continuing multi-year appointments, who are active within the CLS.
- Deadline: rolling deadline from mid-September to the end of February.
- Proposals can be submitted to: clsseedfunding@gmail.com and in cc to Janet van Hell, jgv3@psu.edu.
- Seed funds need to be used within the fiscal year. This means that all seed funds awarded in an academic year must be spent and processed with Heather Mann by June of that year.
- Funding is intended to provide support for the development of new and innovative research projects, in particular the funding of pilot studies to inform and increase competitiveness of external grant proposals.
- Funding can be used to pay participants, research expenses, travel costs to field research sites, or research assistant time (only undergraduate RAs on wage-payroll basis; no graduate student RA can be paid because seed funds cannot cover graduate student tuition).
- Allowable travel expenses to field research sites are airfare/mileage and lodging (based on actual costs, so no per diem). Please note that if traveling to an international field location, your trip must be logged and approved through the Travel Safety Network. You will receive a TSN completion email that must be submitted to Heather Mann along with your travel expense receipts.
- Funding is intended for research-related expenses, and will not cover costs that are not directly related to research/data collection or costs that are generally covered by departments, such as: team meeting expenses, meals or snacks, conference travel, delivery of outreach programs or services, student projects (masters, dissertation research), publication costs, or course release.
Review
- A committee, consisting of faculty from different CLS-affiliated departments and who together use a wide range of research approaches within language science, will review the proposals and will make a decision within 3 weeks after the submission.
- Criteria for review: All proposals must meet the points outlined above. Priority is given to collaborative proposals that propose new and innovative research projects in the form of pilot work that can be used to inform (~proof of concept) external grant proposals and increase their competitiveness. CLS seed funding proposals should present theoretically and empirically well-grounded research questions, a well-articulated plan of research activities, evidence for access to the research population of interest, a longer-term context including grant application plan, and a budget.
Structure and submission of proposals
- Proposals must be submitted as one document via email to clsseedfunding@gmail.com and in cc to Janet van Hell, jgv3@psu.edu.
- The current template of the proposal submission will be circulated through the CLS listserv, and can also be obtained by writing to Janet van Hell at jgv3@psu.edu.
- Note that, in case IRB approval has not yet been obtained, researchers are expected to prepare and submit the appropriate requests for IRB approval for the proposed research shortly (within two weeks) after acceptance of their seed funding proposal.
Project reports
Investigators are expected to provide a brief (one page) final report upon completion of the project, by August 31 of the year in which the research was funded. These reports allow us to track and report research outcomes as well as monitor the successfulness of the seed grant opportunity. Please submit your report to the CLS administrative assistant Brittany Glunt, bdg11@psu.edu.
- If you submit an external grant proposal or manuscript that has benefited from seed funding (e.g., using data collected under the seed grant), please send that information to Janet van Hell, jgv3@psu.edu, so that we can add it to the CLS annual report we submit to the College.
- If you need to make changes to the proposed research, project team, design, or budget, please send a request to budget manager Heather Mann, hmg108@psu.edu, with details of the change(s).