Microgrants
Do you have an innovative idea?
Do you lack a track record in the area? Lack preliminary data for a grant application? Is it not related to your department? Are there insufficient resources to generate the data critical to publish? Does it seem too far out even for innovative idea seed funding? This is for you! We expect to provide $8,000-$10,000 each for one or two research projects. Bright and highly motivated high school students interested in disease research want to fundraise for research related to their diseases of focus: Mental Illness (chosen by the students).
If you are interested in applying for a microgrant, please prepare a short application (one or two pages) in the following format and send it to microgrant at mircore.org. Please be concise.
Title: descriptive to general public
Specific hypothesis (without proprietary information) which addressed by this project
Potential impact in terms of the disease (one or two sentences)
Brief project description (no more than one or two paragraphs)
Budget (simple total amount; our microgrant is not available for indirect cost)
Agreement to share negative results (not valuable for your paper/grant but useful for others to avoid similar pitfalls)
Data sharing plan (any format acceptable)
Process:
Out of two projects we selected, one will be voted to get the fund by public donations.
Votes will be counted based on the donations to each project.
At the end of the fundraiser, the one project receiving the most votes will get funding.
Timelines:
Start of the fundraiser by high school students: February 1
End of the fundraiser: May 31
Funding availability: possibly by the end of June (as soon as funding is transferred from the fundraiser site)
Our expectation:
Share the negative raw data with the research community at large through our website.