Over 175 project proposals were submitted by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee faculty and staff for the second round of funding through the Research Growth Initiative.

The program aims to expand the university’s research enterprise by investing in proposals from UWM. It is designed to put more researchers into the process of research and help enable all disciplines, including humanities and the arts, to gain access to research funding.

The initiative allows those employees to apply for initial funding, which is awarded by the university.

“I think that we discovered that this program is best suited for new research, so I think we probably got proposals that were focused on that type of work and last time, we may have gotten a broader range of projects,” said Mark Harris, associate dean for Research in Graduate School.

The changes taking place for the second wave of funding include a change in the percentage of faculty salary that corresponds with course release, a rule prohibiting an applicant from being the lead proposer on more than two proposals and an earlier deadline for the application process, Harris said.

The funding for this round of the RGI should be at about the same level as the first round, Harris said.

Last year, 44 projects were awarded funding through UWM.

This year, Harris said, he expects the number of projects to receive funding to be about the same. Harris said the number of projects that will receive funding are based off several factors, including what the average request for funding is on all projects.

“We chose projects in terms of their merit,” Harris said. “So we basically funded them until we ran out of money.”

Some projects were committed to be funded this year, Harris said. But he said that some money has been carried forward to offset those commitments.

Although it has been almost a year since the first wave of funding began, it will be another 12 to 18 months until UWM can see if the first round was a success, administrators said.

“We are much too early in the process to know how the external proposals will fare,” said Chancellor Carlos Santiago in an e-mail. “The awards started in summer or fall, and the anticipated submission dates for most external proposals is in late spring through early fall of 2007. It usually takes about six months for grant agencies to decide on which proposals they will fund.”

That measure of success is in line with how the first wave of the RGI was presented, Harris said, “which is why we initially set it up as a three-year program.”

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