For proposals seeking support of $10,000 or less ($15,000 or less for outreach & engagement proposals), see the DSI Small Seed Grant Program.

Eligibility: 

The primary applicant must be faculty or research staff (P&A) with their primary appointment at the University of Minnesota. Adjunct or affiliated faculty are not eligible for funding under this program.

Medium and Large Seed Funding Limits and Application Deadlines: 

• Medium Seed Grant funding limits: $10,000 to $50,000
• Large Seed Grant funding limits: $50,000 to $120,000
• Total Number of Awards: Varies, based on availability of funding
• Maximum proposal duration: 36 months
• Application deadline: October 6, 2023
• Funding begins: Anytime between January 1 and September 30 of the year following submission.

Program Overview: 

DSI Seed Grant funds are intended to promote, catalyze, accelerate, and advance UMN-based data science research so that UMN faculty and staff are well prepared to compete for longer-term external funding opportunities. Proposals from all disciplines and across all campuses, including interdisciplinary collaborations, intersecting with Data Science are encouraged to apply, with priority given to proposals that will enable or bridge applications to larger funding opportunities and/or create new cross-disciplinary or cross-system collaborations.  Priority will be given to proposals that align with at least one of the areas of the MnDRIVE initiative and the current DSI focus areas.

The current DSI focus areas are:

• Foundational Data Sciences: Topics that are foundational to data science applications including data-intensive and data-informed topics and applications along with methodological research in areas such as signal processing, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence as well as topics in ethics and privacy. Fundamental methods dealing with data storage, archiving, sharing, acquisition, compression, or transmission are included. This includes, but is not limited to, disciplines that underlie data science such as statistics, mathematics, computer science, philosophy, and social and behavioral sciences.

• Digital Health and Personalized Health Care Delivery: The broad scope of digital health includes disciplines such as mobile health (mHealth), public health, health information technology (HIT), wearable devices or tech, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized healthcare and medicine. It includes enhancements to patient and consumer health and healthcare delivery through capacity-building activities and continuous, personalized, predictive, participative, and preventive approaches.

Medium and large seed grants provide a higher funding limit and support proposals for a longer duration; hence, the required justification for these two programs is greater than for the Small Seed proposals. Examples of how RC Seed Grant funding may be used include:  

• Production of preliminary results that will be used in a future grant submission
• Production and management of high value datasets used by the broader scholarly community (UMN or beyond)
• Travel to meetings or conferences where upcoming external funding opportunities will be discussed
• Convening UMN-based meetings to discuss or plan for external funding opportunity
• Bridge research efforts to the next funding opportunity
• Other efforts seeking to grow research related to MnDRIVE and data science

Equipment, non-PI salary, supplies, and services are all allowable expenses. For a seed grant to be successful, an investigator must justify how the expenses will help to advance their informatics research and perhaps also align long term with the broader informatics landscape at the University.

Medium Seed Grant Required Application Materials:

• A proposal written in single-spaced, 11-point Calibri or Arial font, with one-inch margins (4-page max, excluding references).
  • The proposal should include a summary of the support requested, including the specific scientific goals, and background relevant to the application. Explain how the proposal will align with one of the MnDRIVE areas and/or the DSI focus areas.
• A budget with a budget justification section outlining proposed expenses and a description of why they are needed to support the proposed activities.  If the proposal duration is greater than 12 months, then a budget summary for each year of the proposal must be provided.
• An explanation of what plans are being made by the investigator to sustain the support of the proposed research activities beyond the seed grant funding.
• A simple biosketch for each investigator included in the proposal (any format). A standard format (such as NSF or NIH) is preferred, but not required.
• A document listing the PIs Current & Pending (C&P) support, if applicable.

Large Seed Grant Required Application Materials:

ALL of the materials for the Medium Seed Grant application, plus the following:

• Collaboration plan (1-page max).  Large seed grant proposals are expected to be multidisciplinary. The one page collaboration plan must include a description of how members from other departments, universities, or economic sectors are directly contributing to the proposed work.  
• A broader impacts document (2-page max) will describe how the proposed research and development will benefit other researchers at the University of Minnesota and/or beyond. Describe how this grant will enable future funding opportunities, if available list the specific opportunities. The ‘broader impacts’ document must include a description of data sets, software, workflows, or other artifacts that will come from the proposed research and development activities and explain why they are of value to researchers and scholars who are not part of the proposal team. The broader impacts document must also include a description of how these artifacts will be shared beyond the proposal team and what plan there is for sustaining these artifacts. 
• OPTIONAL: Cost sharing description (1-page max). List any in-kind contributions of the total budget. Cost sharing may be in the form of direct contributions to the proposed budget, in-kind contributions*, or a combination thereof. Cost sharing from a sponsored project account may require written approval from the sponsor.  In-kind contributions must provide a clear explanation for the basis of the in-kind valuation.

For questions about this program, please email dsi-grants@umn.edu

*Note on in-kind contributions:

In-kind contributions may not include the salary equivalent of the effort that the faculty member or their collaborators expect to contribute to the proposed project. In-kind matching for someone’s salary can only come from hiring someone who would not otherwise be able to participate in the proposed research if they were not paid from the proposed seed grant budget. Direct funding or a valuation of services funded from other sources other than the DSI, MnDRIVE, or the OVPR may be included as contributions toward in-kind matching.

Some examples of allowable matching contributions (funded by another source other than the DSI, MnDRIVE, or the OVPR):

• Software developer, e.g., MSI or external provider
• Research consultant from UMN service provider, e.g., Research Computing or IHI
• Travel expenses, where travel is discussed in the project narrative and linked to the success of the seed grant
• Dedicated data storage or computing costs from MSI or an external cloud provider
• Sequencing fees to collect data required by the proposed project
• One time cost or subscription fee over the proposed work period to access relevant data
• Graduate RAs salary, tuition, and benefits paid for by a federal, state, or private sponsor provided that sponsor is not the DSI, MnDRIVE, or the OVPR