Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge

President's Research Excellence Program

Ohio State aims to grow its research and innovation enterprise and increase its research eminence among the nation’s and the world’s research universities by attracting more externally sponsored research funding, enabling curiosity-driven research and discoveries, and addressing large, complex societal challenges. 

Towards these goals, the President’s Research Excellence (PRE) program, established in 2021 by the Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge, provides seed support for cross- and interdisciplinary research that have the potential to attract external funding. This year the university will award up to $2.5 million in PRE grants. 

 

Specifically, the PRE program supports:

  • Accelerator proposals are for small teams formed to pursue curiosity-driven, novel, high-risk and high-reward research. The grants may be up to $50,000. 
  • Catalyst proposals are for large cross- and interdisciplinary teams to pursue large-scale, high-impact research that addresses emerging or existing challenges of national and international societal importance, generates long-term, sustained, and significant impact, and positions Ohio State as the leader in this area. These grants may be up to $200,000. 

 

Eligibility 

A lead PI for this program must be a faculty member, either tenure/tenure track or research, or a clinical-track faculty member who is engaged in research. PI status at Ohio State is required for all lead PIs. Co-PIs can be faculty, research staff or post-docs from intellectually distinct disciplines. Proposing teams must include a minimum of three Ohio State researchers from distinctively different interdisciplinary areas.

See the program RFPs below for full eligibility requirements, restrictions and deadlines.

Please note: researchers may only be named as PI or Co-PI on a single PRE project proposal per Accelerator or Catalyst competition. If any researcher is named as PI or Co-PI on more than one proposal in the same competition (Accelerator or Catalyst), only the first proposal submitted, as indicated by the time and date stamp from the submission site, will be reviewed and any proposal submitted with a duplicate investigator named after that will be disqualified. Any PI or Co-PI named on an active, awarded PRE project (Accelerator or Catalyst) cannot be named as such on another PRE proposal (Accelerator or Catalyst) until the awarded PRE project period ends.