Research and Innovation Seed Program (SciRIS)

The College of Science Research and Innovation Seed (SciRIS) Program funds projects based on collaborative research within our community and beyond. The program's awards seed funding for high impact collaborative proposals that build teams, pursue fundamental discoveries and create societal impact.

Founded in 2018, SciRIS accelerates the pace of research, discovery and innovation in the College of Science by enabling scientists to work across an array of disciplines in a mentored environment.

The program provides three tiers of funding for collaborative projects: $10,000, which funds research planning, team formation and initial experiments; $75,000, which supports a research project to develop a proof of concept; and $125,000 to accelerate work toward or commensurate with an external funding opportunity.

Recent projects funded by SciRIS

• Exploring how processing affects chemical composition and nutritional quality of Pacific Dulse, a collaboration between Microbiology, Biochemistry and Biophysics, Integrative Biology, HMSC, OSU-Cascades and College of Agricultural Sciences.
• Creating new analytical tools to assess how microbes and parasites in complex ecological communities interact over time, a collaboration between Statistics, Integrative Biology and College of Agricultural Sciences.
• Using mass spectrometry to differentiate triple negative breast cancer cells, a collaboration between Chemistry, Statistics, Mathematics, College of Engineering and College of Agricultural Sciences.
• Developing diagnostic tools to identify fish parasites and diseases at the molecular level and studying those communities over time, a collaboration between Integrative Biology, Microbiology, Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine, College of Agricultural Sciences, USGS and National Parks Services