Celebrating Internal Research Support

This Monday, there was a wonderful in-person gathering in the Bioethics Library of a set of faculty who have been awarded different internal grants to support their research. Colleagues met in the same room, rediscovering shared interests and learning about new research projects.

We have run such competitions for internal grants for some years. This year 133 faculty submitted proposals for research support. A group of peer faculty reviewers read these proposals – 400 reviews in total. In short, this is a large enterprise with rigorous peer review. It is an important signal of the commitment of the university to faculty research.

Twenty faculty received summer salary supplement grants. The Summer Salary Supplement (SSS) Program provides support for two months of work on a research or creative arts project between June and August. An SSS consists of $10,000 in taxable income (plus fringe). If a faculty member receives other summer salary support, from either external or university sources, the SSS will be adjusted so that the total salary support does not exceed 2/9ths of the faculty member’s academic year salary.

The projects being supported among the 20 faculty members are quite diverse. They include one study using quantitative modeling combined with qualitative process tracing to investigate the relationship between armed conflict, identity, economic development, and election outcomes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to another study of how nation-state climate policy is affecting trade among nations mounted by a Georgetown faculty member collaborating with scholars in Germany and Uganda.

Eleven faculty were awarded annual research grants. The Annual Research Grant (ARG) Program provides support for non-salary expenses incurred in the conduct of a specific research or scholarship project. An ARG provides between $5,000 and $10,000 in funding to facilitate new or on-going research or scholarship that could not be conducted or completed without the support. Awards are made in the Fall semester, to cover expenses incurred through the end of the following summer.

These projects ranged from a historical data collection for a book project describing the multi-generation effects of a wealthy mining family on global capitalism to a study of how nanoparticles might be used for drug delivery of active pharmaceutical ingredients inside the human body to another on how computer vision algorithms often employed in artificial intelligence can be affected by small occlusions in the image.

Twenty faculty were award research leaves. The Georgetown University Research Leave (GURL) Program provides one semester of leave for tenure line faculty to conduct research or scholarship, or to work on a project in the creative arts. GURLs provide one semester of leave, free of all teaching and service obligations, to tenure line faculty at any rank – Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor. Awards are made in the Fall semester, to be taken in the Fall or Spring of the following academic year.

One leave will permit work on a critical edition of Cimarosa’s comic La ballerina amante by working in the Library of the Conservatory of Naples, the State Archives, the Biblioteca della Storia Patria and the Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli. Another will focus on how tariff increases from China and the US have affected the location of multinational firm activity.

Although the above mention just a few of the research activities supported by the internal grants, one quickly gets a sense of how varied is the scholarship at a research university. It is gratifying to see how many of our colleagues are working at the cutting edge of their fields, tackling important gaps in our understanding of our world, its past, present, and future.