Research & scholarship

Faculty Expertise Database

The Faculty Expertise Database lists faculty’s research and teaching areas of expertise. Using keywords, you can identify faculty with scholarly and teaching expertise by subject area and major. In addition to facilitating potential research and teaching collaborations, the database can help identify faculty eligible for various funding opportunities. The database is opt-in, and all UWB faculty are eligible to be listed. If you want to be added to the database, complete this Faculty Expertise Database information form (please note a UW NetID is required to access the form).

Faculty Writing Group

The Faculty Writing Group is a weekly group for faculty looking to improve and/or maintain adherence to best writing practices — or simply be in a supportive community of peers engaging in scholarly and creative writing. This group is open to all UWB faculty. Contact uwbfacultysuccess@uw.edu to learn more.

Office of Sponsored Research

The Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) provides resources and support for research administration to advance investigators’ agendas. Year after year, the team supports academic inquiry through research centers at UW Bothell by facilitating the submission of competitive grant proposals to a wide array of sponsors while managing awards in a compliant manner for individual principal investigators and units. To learn more about resources and events offered by the OSR, visit the Office of Sponsored Research website.

Grant Resource Center (GRC)

The Grants Resource Center (GRC) is a service of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) that provides grant-related resources to faculty. The GRC supports faculty by helping them access resources and pursue grants and contracts. The center assists faculty in locating and identifying funding opportunities, providing examples of successful grant proposals, and connecting members to program officers. UWB’s Grants Resource Center membership provides all UWB faculty with access. Contact uwbfacultysuccess@uw.edu for information on how to access the GRC.

CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund

The CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund is a partnership between CoMotion and the Washington Research Foundation that provides up to $1,000,000 per year with $75,000 grants awarded to up to 20 teams. The mission of the partnership is to fund and support projects with high impact potential that are unlikely to get there without gap funding. The Innovation Gap Fund program is intended to help technologies transition between the conclusion of academic research grants and the level of development at which they can attract seed stage investment. Projects utilizing these grants have used the funds to research customer demand and validate markets, create prototypes, and initiate beta testing.

EarthLab Innovation Grants

EarthLab is a visionary institute at the UW that pushes boundaries to develop innovative, actionable, and equitable solutions to environmental challenges in areas where climate intersects with social justice. They do this by connecting across sectors and academic disciplines to inspire and incentivize new partnerships that bridge the UW and the wider community. The EarthLab Innovation Grants Program seeks to invest in teams of University of Washington researchers, students and partners from the community to co-produce meaningful solutions and strategies addressing environmental issues.

*Note: The Request for Applications (RFA) process is paused for FY2025 to allow time to focus on supporting current cohorts of grantees and conduct a thorough evaluation of the program’s impact, successes, and future opportunities.

Global Innovation Fund (GIF)

Global Engagement Fellows

The Office of Global Affairs (OGA) offers awards up to $2,000 to convene new cross-disciplinary groups of faculty and staff (referred to as “communities”) that share a common interest in:

• Region or countries
• Research themes
• Good practice/innovation in inclusive globally engaged teaching (including study abroad)
• Other topics relating to global engagement

The purpose of these awards is to foster new connections among faculty and staff at the UW.

Research Awards

The OGA offers seed funding to develop cross-college and cross-continent research collaborations through the Global Innovation Fund (GIF):

• Tier 1 Research Awards for up to $5,000
• Tier 2 Research Awards for up to $20,000
• Tier 3 Research Awards for collaboration with Tohoku University up to $20,000

Study Abroad/Away Awards

The OGA offers funding for the creation of Study Abroad/Away programs:

• Seed funding up to $3,000 (domestic program) and up to $5,000 (international program) to support pre-program visits for the creation of a Study Abroad program.
• Funding up to $10,000 a year (for three years) to embed a global component in a Spring or Winter class.
• Funding up to $10,000 per year (for three years) to create a new domestic (within the U.S.) Study Away program.

Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS): Translational Research Partnership Awards – Academic Community Partnerships

The ITHS offers Academic Community Partnership Awards to jump-start partnerships between academic and community investigators in new projects that investigate a community-based health problem, disseminate evidence-based health innovations into practice, target health promotion or prevention, or examine ways to enhance or implement sustainable health programs in community settings. The award offers community organizations, whether primarily health-related or not, opportunities to initiate and help organize and lead biomedical research projects addressing important health needs that they identify in the communities they serve.

Population Health Pilot Research Grants

Population Health Pilot Research Grants encourage the development of new interdisciplinary collaborations among investigators — and with community-based partners — for projects that address critical challenges to population health. There are three levels of Pilot Research Grants:

• Tier 1: Support researchers in laying the foundation for a future project to generate proof-of-concept.
• Tier 2: Support faculty and PI-eligible staff to develop preliminary data or proof-of-concept needed to pursue follow-on funding to scale one’s efforts.
• Tier 3: Faculty and PI-eligible staff to create follow-on opportunities for impactful projects that have developed preliminary data or realized proof-of-concept and are seeking to scale their efforts and/or expand the scope of their work.

Royalty Research Fund (RRF)

The Royalty Research Fund is a competitive awards program that provides research support to University of Washington faculty. The purpose of the RRF is to support advancements in new areas of research, particularly:

• For faculty who are junior in rank.
• In cases where funding may provide unique opportunities to increase applicants’ competitiveness for subsequent funding.
• In disciplines for which external funding opportunities are minimal.

There are two RRF opportunities: the standard RRF program and the RRF Scholar program (which provides one quarter of release time for faculty with full teaching loads to engage in concentrated scholarly activities).

Simpson Center for the Humanities

The Simpson Center provides financial and administrative support for cross-disciplinary research, teaching, and engagement projects. We support a wide range of activities, including fellowships, cross-departmental research groups, scholarly conferences, community-engaged collaborations, and other projects.

• Society of Scholars Research Fellowships: Supports faculty in pursuing their research and sharing their individual projects-in-progress in the multidisciplinary, bi-weekly forum of the fellowship cohort—which typically is composed of 8 members of the faculty, at all ranks, and 3 dissertating doctoral students—over the course of the academic year.
• Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship: Supports scholars pursuing research projects that use digital technologies in innovative and intensive ways and/or explore the historical, social, aesthetic, and cross-cultural implications of digital cultures.
• Colloquia and Conferences: Supports cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary colloquia and conferences of various scales (working conferences, international research conferences, etc.) led by a UW tenure-track faculty member. Topics should be of interest to scholars across two or more disciplines.
• Cross-disciplinary Research Clusters: Supports seeding new scholarly activity and develops further pathways for collaboration by bringing together UW faculty and graduate students from different departments and disciplines who share research interests.

UW Bothell Scholarship Research Creative Practice (SRCP) Grant Program

The UW Bothell SRCP Grant Program is intended to competitively support UW Bothell faculty and librarian scholarship and creative practice across all disciplines. Among proposals of comparable merit, preference is given to junior faculty. Proposals from senior faculty are funded only when they support a genuinely new direction in the applicant’s research and/or career development, provide a unique opportunity to compete for subsequent one-time (or infrequently offered) funding, or originate in a discipline for which external funding opportunities are minimal.