Geography graduate student Claire Simon (back to camera) interviews a Nepali entrepreneur with help from interpreter Yogendra Man Shrestha, May 2008 in Ilam, Nepal. Simon took part in the Innovative Seed Grant-funded project, "Analyzing the Role of Social Entreprenuership in Sustainable Community Development." (Photo courtesy of Engineering for Developing Communities and Service Learning Programs)

Creativity and research have come together in a whole new way through the Innovative Seed Grant. The grant helps fund new projects by donating up to $50,000 to research, scholarship and creative activities that work toward ground-breaking ideas and have a direct artistic and academic impact on future funding and new collaborations.

“By actively cultivating interdisciplinary and collaborative research, scholarship and creative works, The Seed Grant Program is already helping to shift the culture,” said Merlyn Holmes, Graduate School coordinator. “More than once I've wondered how many projects never saw the light of day before the Innovative Seed Grant Program was initiated in 2007.”

In 2008, 22 grants were successfully administered. The grants are funded by the Offices of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Provost, and managed by Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Russell Moore with the intention to raise the research facilities at CU to their full potential. “The Innovative Seed Grant Program will help make CU-Boulder an even more prominent research institution than it already is” Holmes said.

Through the grant, Michael Zimmerman, director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts and principle investigator for the Innovative Seed Grant, procured a series of seminars that bring together faculty and graduate students from natural science, arts, engineering and humanities to research various prospects of advancements and limitations in a certain subject. “Our seed grant will make possible two seminars, one in 2009-2010 and another in 2010-2011, that will provide a formal context in which faculty and grad students from very different research/creative areas can explore ways they can work together” said Zimmerman.

Because of the large population of CU-Boulder, faculty members and students are often unaware of the advancements of others in various studies and colleges. The seminar will provide an opportunity for researchers to combine ideas and methods in order to enhance productivity in a subject area.

“My collaborators and I envision this seminar as a way to bring together people with shared interests in visual representation, but with very different ways of understanding and utilizing such representation” Zimmerman said. “We hope that in the process of examining different ways of representing the topic under discussion, seminar participants will begin to discover possibilities for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaborative ventures.”

The Innovative Seed Grant has already made an impact on future research techniques with the potential to continue advancement. For more information including a list of Spring 2008 recipients visit the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research website.

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