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Germination

Our many societal challenges highlight the pressing need for impactful fundamental research questions that will lead to transformative solutions. To stimulate the cultivation of an impact-driven research culture, the NSF Office of Emerging Frontiers and Multidisciplinary Activities offers the GERMINATION program:

The GERMINATION program supports the design of pedagogical frameworks, platforms, and/or environments that enable academic researchers in STEM fields to conceive research ideas and questions with potentially transformative outcomes.

Since Fiscal Year 2016, the NSF has funded several GERMINATION pilot projects (listed below), which ranged from prototyping faculty development programs for research transformation to training graduate students in the skill of question formulation itself.

To catalyze development of novel approaches and expand promising pilot approaches, the NSF supported two tracks in Fiscal Year 2022: GERMINATION Innovation and GERMINATION Expansion.


Contact
For more information, please contact Germination program officer Louise R. Howe, Ph.D.

 

Germination Awards

Fiscal Year 2022 Awards

EAGER GERMINATION Collaborative Award: Leveraging a Research Development Professional Network to Catalyze Statewide Innovative and Societally Relevant Research
Principal Investigator: Melanie Bauer, Nova Southeastern University (award abstract)
Principal Investigator: Joshua Roney, University of Central Florida (award abstract)
Principal Investigator: Sandra Stephens, University of West Florida (award abstract)
Principal Investigator: Beth Hodges, Florida State University (award abstract)
Principal Investigator: Jeanne Viviani, Florida Atlantic University (award abstract)

EAGER GERMINATION: TRANSPIRE - A transdisciplinary pedagogy for postdoctoral development
Principal Investigator: Linda Vigdor
City University of New York - Advanced Science Research Center

EAGER GERMINATION: Computational Modeling from Scenario Development: A Pedagogy for Generating Novel Research Questions to Address Critical Societal Issues
Principal Investigator: Eduardo Lopez
George Mason University

EAGER GERMINATION: Immersive Training Studio for Technology-Environment-Energy-Water-Society (TEEWS) Grand Challenges
Principal Investigator: Alexander Dowling
University of Notre Dame

EAGER GERMINATION: Chemistry Graduate Education - Sustainability and the Circular Economy
Principal Investigator: Kevin Belfield
New Jersey Institute of Technology

GERMINATION EXPANSION: Building Question Formulation Capacity through the Research Question Network (rQnet)
Principal Investigator: Sara Wadia-Fascetti
Northeastern University

GERMINATION EXPANSION: Center for Urban Transformations at Georgia State University
Principal Investigator: David Iwaniec
Georgia State University

Fiscal Year 2020 Awards

EAGER Germination: Project Confluence: Engineering and Science to Address Community Needs
Principal Investigator: Darshan Karwat
Arizona State University

Fiscal Year 2018 Awards

EAGER Germination: What we talk about when we talk about big ideas: Using case studies to train PhD students in ideation and questioning processes
Principal Investigator: Amy Charles
University of Iowa

EAGER Germination: Faculty Springboard to Advance Breakthrough Science by Post-Tenure Faculty
Principal Investigator: George Truskey
Duke University

Fiscal Year 2017 Awards

EAGER Germination Renewal: Extending a platform to germinate transformative science through diverse collaboration
Principal Investigator: William Barley
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

EAGER Germination Renewal: Cultivating Creativity in STEM Research through Mindfulness Training
Principal Investigator: Susan Hagness
University of Wisconsin-Madison

EAGER Germination Renewal: Piloting a Center for Transformative Research at Boise State University
Principal Investigator: William Hughes
Boise State University

EAGER Germination: Using Human-Centered Design to Conceptualize and Prototype Ways to Increase Graduate Student Engagement with Transformative Research
Principal Investigator: Patrick Little
Harvey Mudd College

EAGER Germination: The Question Improvement Model: A Simple and Scalable Model for Improving the Question Formulation Skills of Ph.D. Students
Principal Investigator: Dan L. Perlman
Brandeis University

EAGER Germination Collaborative Award: An Experimental Approach to Formulate Transformative Research Questions
Principal Investigator: Grace Wang, SUNY System Administration (award abstract)
Principal Investigator: Kemper Lewis, SUNY at Buffalo (award abstract)
SUNY System Administration/SUNY at Buffalo

Fiscal Year 2016 Awards

EAGER Germination: Crystallizing Transformative Ideas by Seeding a Diverse Knowledge Community
Principal Investigator: William Barley
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

EAGER Germination: Cultivating Creativity and Innovation in Engineering Research through Mindfulness Training
Principal Investigator: Susan Hagness
University of Wisconsin-Madison

EAGER Germination: Aligning Stakeholders and Structures to Enable Risk Taking (ASSERT)
Principal Investigator: William Hughes
Boise State University

EAGER Germination: A Seed-Funding and Analytics Platform for High-Risk/High-Impact Research
Principal Investigator: Eric Isaacs
University of Chicago

EAGER Germination: From 0 to 2
Principal Investigator: Claudia Neuhauser
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Related Awards

2023 GERMINATION Investigator Workshop
Principal Investigator: Patrick Little
Harvey Mudd College

Workshop: 2021 Germination Investigator Workshop
Principal Investigator: William Barley
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Workshop: 2020 Conference on Question Formulation Technique in Higher Education
Principal Investigator: Sara Wadia-Fascetti
Northeastern University

Workshop: 2019 Germination Meeting at Boise State University
Principal Investigator: Donna Llewellyn
Boise State University

Workshop: Initiation of the Highly Integrated Basic and Responsive Research (HIBAR) Research Alliance
Principal Investigator: Sandra Brown
University of California, San Diego