The Interim Provost and I are excited to support this past year’s slate of  29 Pitt Momentum Funds awardees. Not only do five of the projects investigate the 2022-2023 Year of Emotional Well-Being theme, I am also thrilled to see the incredible variety and vitality of the projects Pitt faculty have successfully proposed. We are proud to support community-based work with autistic adults, as well as studying how mountains form. We’re also proud to support researchers studying racial disparities in psychiatric committals, as well as those seeking to understand how waves affect swimming speed of microorganisms in lakes and oceans.

Rob A. Rutenbar
Senior Vice Chancellor for Research

View the 2022-2023 Momentum Funds Winners >>

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Think Big: Pitt Momentum Funds

Have you ever wondered how to solve a very big problem in your field of expertise, but aren't sure how? The Pitt Momentum Funds is one of many vehicles to take your brain on the ride of its life with the added bonus of awards and recognition with your colleagues and a chance to cross disciplines to tackle those very big world problems together.

In the 2019–2020 academic year, then Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Ann E. Cudd and Senior Vice Chancellor for Research (SVCR) Rob A. Rutenbar collaborated to enhance and streamline internal funding opportunities for faculty research while continuing to support high-quality research, scholarship, and creative endeavors.

The result was a jointly funded large-scale research development fund—the Pitt Momentum Funds—which restructured the University’s suite of internal funding programs (Central Research Development Fund, Social Science Research Initiative, and Special initiative to Promote Scholarly Activities in the Humanities) and added a new SVCR/Provost Fund to provide allocations for research projects based on field of study and scope or size of project team.

To kickoff new funding cycles, the Internal Funding Showcase event provides awardees a venue to share their work and receive recognition for their research findings, as well as engage with researchers from across the University.

View All Pitt Momentum Funds Past Winners by Year >>

 

New for 2023: Pitt Momentum Funds Dashboard

In reviewing the wonderful achievements of our research community at Pitt, the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research built a dashboard to show all of the interdisciplinary projects awarded from around the University and our regional campuses as part of the Pitt Momentum Funds awards since 2019. This dashboard is meant to be interactive so researchers, faculty, staff and students can see what awards were made between different schools, centers and institutions. Clicking on a line (branch) between nodes (entities) will reveal all awarded Pitt Momentum Funds for that relationship over the years. So, click around and see what you discover about the research happening at Pitt. 

Interdisciplinary Scholarship Projects Receive Internal Funding at Pitt

Awards are made across the breadth of interdisciplinary scholarship at the University, and all eligible faculty are encouraged to propose new, innovate ideas that can contribute meaningful insight, understanding, or solutions to societal challenges.

Teamed projects are reviewed by multidisciplinary faculty panels and individual projects are reviewed by one of four committees:

• Creative Arts, Performing Arts & Humanities
• Engineering, Technology, Natural Sciences, and Mathematical Sciences
• Health & Life Sciences
• Social Sciences, which includes Business, Policy, Law, Education, Informatics, and Social Work

 

Pitt Momentum Fund Grants by Project Scope

Depending on how your research team plans to work together for these projects, the priming (formerly seeding), teaming, and scaling grants offer an array of options. Funding is available through three tiers, depending on the size of the research project team and research lifecycle stage.

Scaling Grants ($400,000)

2-year term with an award cap of $400,000. Scaling grants enable multi-disciplinary teams to competitively scale their research efforts in targeted pursuit of large-scale external funding.

Teaming Grants ($60,000)

1-year term with an award cap of $60,000. Teaming grants support the formation of new multi-disciplinary collaborations to successfully pursue large-scale external funding.

Priming Grants ($25,000)

​1-year term with an award cap of $25,000. Priming (formerly Seeding) grants support significant and innovative scholarship by individual or groups of faculty at all ranks at the University of Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on early career faculty and areas where external funding is extremely limited.