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Please email rioseedgrant@colorado.edu.

Seed grant recipients (lead PIs) from the past two years are not eligible, but may serve as an unpaid co-PI on proposals the year after receiving their award. Like PIs, co-PIs may only be funded in one active seed grant. For instance, if someone serves as an unpaid co-PI in a 2020 project, they can be a paid co-PI for a 2021 project.

Once the program is open and accepting applications, applicants should navigate to the online portal on the program page where they will be prompted to log in to OpenWater using your CU IdentiKey and password. If you need assistance, please contact rioseedgrant@colorado.edu.

Each application should have a lead PI employed by CU ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ. Co-PIs and collaborators are allowed and can be funded as long as the co-PI(s) are CU ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ faculty. Unpaid collaborators from other institutions are permitted. Please note that seed grant recipients (lead PIs) from the past two years are not eligible to apply to the current year competition, and may not be a co-PI on proposals the year after receiving their award.

Applicants may request up to two weeks of summer salary in their proposal budgets.

Third party contractor support is permitted if the contractor directly supports the research and is an integral part of the project. 

All files must be less than 50 MB.

Documents should be in Arial 11 pt type with at least 0.5" margins and no more than 13 pages total in length, including all components of the application (described below). Each section of the proposal must be clearly marked to be considered compliant and eligible for review. 

• Proposal / Project Plan: up to 5 pages
• Supplemental Materials: up to 8 pages, consisting of the following:
  • PI CV: up to 2 pages
  • Abstract / Project Summary: up to 1 page
  • Co-PIs/Collaborators: up to 1 page
  • Budget and budget justification: up to 2 pages
  • Honors, awards, representative scholarly works or publications relevant to proposal: up to 2 pages

See the application process and requirements section for more specific page count requirements.  

Yes, an adjoint professor in a department at CU ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ is eligible to apply as a lead PI. In the interest of making it clear to reviewers that the funds will benefit CU ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ research / faculty, RIO encourages applicants in this situation to describe the nature of their appointment in their proposal to make it clear that their appointment is permanent/long-term. If it is a short-term appointment, or if it is unclear to reviewers, this may come up as a red flag to reviewers.

Yes.

This section is exists to provide an opportunity for the applicant to highlight things that they may not have included in their abbreviated CV. This section is intended to help reviewers understand the applicant's preparedness and qualifications to successfully undertake the proposed work and achieve what they set out to do. It is at the discretion of the applicant what, specifically, to include.