Our small grants program is aimed at projects that need a small amount of funds to spark the initiation of the project in order to be prepared to submit external grants or to seed other research activities. We expect to fund 2 small grants per cycle. PI must be a faculty member. Senior Professional Research Staff are also eligible to apply for the TYDE seed funds. Maximum funding: $30,000 total, 1 year maximum.
Timing of Small Grant Proposal Cycles
- FALL CYCLE (for funding to begin at the start of spring semester): Proposals due October 10 at midnight, and award decisions made by end of October.
- SPRING CYCLE (for funding to begin at the start of fall semester): Proposals due March 10 at midnight, and award decisions made by end of March.
Requirements and Priorities for Small Grants
All proposals will be evaluated based on:
- The strength of the research design and methods. In particular:
- The methods are optimized for answering the research questions and/or building the digital intervention tool.
- The approach balances feasibility and ambition and employs cutting-edge tools.
- The team demonstrably has the necessary expertise, tool, materials, and access to participants.
- The project centers thoughtful youth participatory or user-centered design, or it has clearly played a role in the earlier stages of the project.
- Their connection to TYDE focal areas and promise for contributing to the knowledge base on digital technology and healthy youth development.
- The potential for the project to “seed” future work, with a clearly-articulated plan for next steps. The following are potential ways to fulfill this expectation:
- Plan to pursue extramural funding that builds on the proposed work
- Continue to develop the research line beyond the funding period
- Provide a resource to the research community (such as an openly-available dataset)
- Translate the research to applications in industry, the public sector, or community building.
- Potential to advance TYDE’s mission of diversity, equity, and inclusion, either through the members of the research team, the study participant population, the community impacted, or the work’s potential to address issues related to mental health equity.
- The team composition and proposed research are meaningfully multidisciplinary. The collaboration spans multiple disciplines, departments, and/or schools in a way that advances and serves the research goals. The current and future research plans incorporate each discipline in a clear and thoughtful way. If there are multiple PIs/co-Is, the more junior researcher is the lead.
Deliverables will differ between work that is developing or testing digital interventions and research that is seeking to understand how youth use technology or the impact of technology on healthy youth development, so proposals will be evaluated on the areas above as appropriate to the project’s aims.
Responsibilities of Small Grant Awardees
In addition to completing the deliverables described in their proposals, grant recipients are expected to:
- Submit a brief final report (300-600 words) describing project activities and outcomes.
- Present at a works-in-progress or other TYDE-related event
- Attend at least 2 TYDE events, such as training workshops and/or talks
- Serve as an ad hoc reviewer on future grant submissions
Instructions for Small Grant Proposals
Submit a proposal by emailing tydesubmissions@virginia.edu with the subject line “Small Grant Proposal Submission.”
Proposals are limited to 3 pages (1 inch margins, size 11 font; excluding references and CVs) and should include the following clearly-labeled sections:
- Title
- Overview and background: Provide an overview of the current state of knowledge related to your research topic. Identify significant gaps in the literature that your project aims to address and a clear explanation of how your proposed research will contribute to advancing the field. Ensure that the background section clearly articulates the relevance and importance of your study within the broader context of existing research, as well as its connection to TYDE’s mission.
- Project description: Provide a detailed project description that includes the following: a clear and concise overview of your research objectives and how they align with the goals of this seed grant; a description of the methodology and key activities you will undertake to achieve these objectives; and an explanation of the expected outcomes and their potential impact on the field. If the project relies on quantitative methods, describe the instruments, analytic plan and include a statement about statistical power and validity/reliability of the data. If the project relies on qualitative methods, describe the methods of data collection, the analytic plan, and how you will address trustworthiness of the data.
- Next steps: What is this research “seeding”? If the next step in the research is applying for external funding, describe the specific funding opportunities and how the investment of seed money will increase competitiveness of the proposal. If the next step is another deliverable, such as a resource for the research community or the translation of research to the community, describe those plans and their feasibility.
- Brief budget and justification: Funds can support expenses for equipment, participant payments, materials, computing services, technical support (e.g., hiring a programmer), meetings, graduate or undergraduate student stipends, staff support, travel for stakeholder collaborations, and up to 1 month of summer salary per year for faculty principal investigators. If the majority of the budget is covering faculty salary, please include in the justification details about why that level of salary support is needed. We encourage projects that are, or eventually will be, proposing novel digital technology development (e.g., cloud-enabled mobile or wearable applications) or large-scale database building to include budget funds for consultation with the UVA Digital Technology Core. If you would like to schedule a consultation or discuss Digital Technology Core resources, please contact Laura Barnes at lb3dp@virginia.edu.
- Project team: Include brief qualifications of principal investigator(s) and any key faculty collaborators, and how the qualifications put the team in a strong position to make progress on its stated goals. Note any expected student involvement.
- CVs for PIs and co-PIs should be submitted as separate documents.
- Letters of support: Brief letters of support from any faculty, external collaborators, or community partners who are essential to the success of the project but who are not co-PIs. They should state that they are committed to providing the necessary resources and support to ensure the success of the project. They should NOT speak to the merit of the research or researchers–a brief paragraph should be sufficient.
Please note, Because the funds for the Grand Challenges come from the Provost, these funds are subject to the 22% University Tax (sometimes called the School Tax), per the University Financial Model. Per the Provost Policy, no indirect costs or administrative charges can be included in the TYDE Budgets. After receiving an award, you must obtain a signature from your School acknowledging that indirect costs cannot be charged to the grants and that the University Tax must be paid by the School via other sources (not the TYDE grant budgets).
