Shared instrument proposal incentive program (SHIP)

Large instrumentation is a growing need throughout the science and engineering disciplines and institutional capital investments are often insufficient to meet these needs.  Many federal granting agencies recognize this shortfall and have developed competitive grant funding mechanism for medium and large capital equipment.  This includes, but are not limited to, the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grants, the National Institutes’ of Health Shared Instrumentation Grants (S10), The Department of Defense’s Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), as well as several other.  While these agencies provide opportunities of grant support, the crafting and management of these multi-faceted applications can be a significant burden to the individual investigator designated to initiate and complete this task.  

The Rice SEA has determined that we would like to incentivize the effort necessary to perform this service by offering user fee credit for any SEA operated instrumentation within our portfolio.

Specific details
The PI of a shared equipment grant determined from its inception to be an SEA owned and operated shared resource will be awards 0.5% of the final requested amount in offset fees for any SEA managed equipment, simply for submission.  If the application is approved and Rice awarded the grant the SEA will provide and additional 2% of the final requested amount in offset fees for any SEA managed equipment.  If the PI has Co-PIs on the grant, the PI can (at his or her discretion) offer some fraction of these user fee offsets to the CoPIs as well.  

This incentive will be available to applicants until $50,000 in user credits per fiscal year has been approved.