Update on T3 and X-Grants for $100 Million President’s Excellence Fund
February 13, 2018
Sent on behalf of President Young and Provost Fierke
Colleagues,
As I mentioned to some of you at yesterday’s Faculty Senate meeting, today we are pleased to announce the first year of the X-Grants Program, the second component of the President’s Excellence Fund Initiative. The President’s Excellence Fund is a commitment of $100 million over ten years to faculty research. A total of $30 million, or approximately $3 million per year, will fund T3 Grants; A total of $70 million, or approximately $7 million per year, will fund larger X-Grants.
T3 Grants Update
In November, we announced the first initiative, Texas A&M Triads for Transformation – or T3 Grants. T3 Grants are seed grants intended to help move the very best ideas from vision to proof of concept. Three tenured or tenure-track faculty members from two or more colleges or schools may form a triad. A total of $3 million per year is available through T3 Grants to fund up to 100 projects at $30,000 each. Currently, the T3 program has a total of 293 projects submitted. The application period for round one ended January 31. A total of 100 projects will be announced in March.
X-Grants
X-Grants, loosely named for “accelerate,” are larger grants that range from $100,000 to $1.5 million per team and involve a larger group of team members. Unlike T3 Grants available only to tenured and tenure-track faculty, X-Grants are open to all faculty, researchers, and staff at Texas A&M University, Texas A&M University-Galveston, and Texas A&M University-Qatar. The X-Grant process launches today. Please see a description on the X-Grants web page.
Next Steps
The Division of Research in the Office of the Provost will continue to facilitate the grants process. A web-based portal for each grant type is accessible at the links provided above.
An X-Grants information session for interested parties will take place on Tuesday, February 20 at 4 PM in the auditorium of the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building and will also be broadcast on TTVN with a recording posted on the X-Grants site afterwards.
During this first part of the X-Grants process, we will solicit high level, interdisciplinary problem statements, questions or topics from Texas A&M faculty, staff and students. Submission of ideas closes on February 27 so go to the X-Grant submission site to submit your innovative and visionary ideas. These submissions will be used to develop overarching themes that interdisciplinary teams will use to generate proposals to compete for X-Grants. X-Grants awards will begin in June.
We look forward to witnessing great breakthroughs that can be accomplished when our faculty, researchers and staff come together to solve challenges through research, discovery, innovation and impact.
Sincerely,
Michael K. Young
President
Carol Fierke
Provost