Dean's Message
Accelerating early-career faculty research
April 2023
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I am proud to announce a new effort here at the Jacobs School of Engineering to empower our early-career faculty to accelerate interdisciplinary research collaborations. The pilot program is unique in that it provides funding for graduate students from two different labs to begin cross-discipline research collaborations.
We launched this pilot to address a chicken-and-egg conundrum. How do faculty demonstrate that an unexpected collaboration is worthy of multi-year funding if the faculty don't have the resources to get the cross-disciplinary research collaboration started?
We named the program the Jacobs School Early Career Faculty Development Award because at least one of the two faculty must be an early-career professor. The goal is that these early collaborations will enable the faculty to successfully compete for multi-year research funding for game-changing interdisciplinary research projects.
This program emerged from a lunch conversation that I had with early-career faculty. This is a great example of faculty at the Jacobs School proposing creative, doable solutions to well-known challenges. In the first story below, we congratulate the six faculty whose cross-disciplinary research projects won the inaugural funding from the new program.
Creative solutions to research funding challenges are something I am always thinking about. I'm in the early stages of a new initiative across every Jacobs School department to help organize the strongest research areas around efforts to win transformative research grants and contracts. You always need to double down on your strengths, even as you work to build up other areas. More on this to come.
Research funding comes from a mix of sources including the US government, industry, foundations and philanthropy. I am always ready to engage in conversations and strategies regarding empowering our community to successfully compete for research funding.
Read the full April 2023 Jacobs School news email online or as a PDF.
As always, I can be reached at DeanPisano@eng.ucsd.edu.
Sincerely,
Al
Albert ("Al") P. Pisano, Dean
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering