The Harvard Data Science Initiative has launched the spring 2022 competitions for two funding opportunities: the Data Science Initiative Faculty Competitive Research Fund and the Postdoctoral Fellows Research Fund, both with deadlines of April 21, 2022. More information on the awards can be found in the synopses below:
HDSI Faculty Competitive Research Fund
Deadline: April 21, 2022
Award Amount: $5,000-$100,000 for one year
Eligible Applicants: Individuals who hold a faculty appointment at a Harvard school and who have principal investigator rights at that school.
The 2022 DSI Competitive Research Fund will support grants that coalesce and accelerate methodologically-focused research. The Initiative is especially interested in projects that intersect with or are likely to have impact within or across the DSI’s research themes:
- Data-Driven Scientific Discovery (includes discovery of new materials, drug and gene discovery, environment, astronomy, neuroscience)
- Markets and Networks (includes networks and influence, innovation and crowds, digital economy, jobs, data-driven decisions, blockchain)
- Personalized Health (includes precision medicine, precision public health, medical informatics, diagnostics, personal devices)
- Evidence-Based Policy (includes equality of opportunity, healthcare economics, democracy and governance, climate change -- resilience and mitigation)
Work that is primarily methodological is also strongly encouraged. The Initiative is interested in promoting advances across many areas that relate to the science of data, including causal inference, visualization, scalable and robust inference, experimental design, interpretability and robustness, ethics (including privacy and fairness), control of false discovery, human-in-the-loop systems, reinforcement learning, adaptive data systems, deep learning, streaming algorithms, theoretical foundations, reproducibility, and data sharing.
HDSI Postdoctoral Fellows Research Fund
Deadline: April 21, 2022
Award Amount: The fund will make one single award of up to $25,000, and two to three smaller awards of $5,000-10,000 each.
Eligible Applicants: Harvard postdoctoral scholars on fixed-term contracts. Applicants must have at least 9 months remaining in their contract by the April deadline.
The goal of the fund is to incentivize and support cross-disciplinary collaboration between data scientists at the postdoctoral level. The Initiative is particularly interested in funding research proposals that aim to:
- Investigate novel applications of data analysis techniques (broadly defined), particularly by transferring methodology from one field to another;
- Share and combine existing but distinct data sets to gain new insights into a problem;
- Involve new collaborations between researchers in separate departments (or fields of research);
- Explore new methods that may help to improve the public understanding of complex technical issues or areas of research.
Funds may be used to hire students, buy access to data or software, or for travel and conference fees. Proposed projects should take a maximum of one year to complete.
Questions about either of these funds may be directed to datascience@harvard.edu.