FTE Host Seed Grant Competition

The Functional Tissue Engineering Program of the CMI hosted a Member Meeting and Seed Grant Competition on October 29, 2018.

The meeting began with a networking reception.  Dr. Starly opened the formal program with a welcome and the 20 members in attendance introduced themselves.

Dr. Starly reviewed the overall direction of the FTE for the upcoming year:

A.  Provost continues to support Translational Regenerative Medicine Cluster.

1. Review papers in respective fields with the intent to involve as many FTE faculty as possible. Will be led by Drs. Ke Cheng, Matt Fisher and Binil Starly.
2. Funds will be available for any of the following: FTE Lunch meetings, Group writing sessions, Artwork preparation and Open-access publication costs
3. Pursue Multiple-PI grants. We need support from FTE faculty for ideas to pursue. Funds can be made available for any or all of the following a) Travel; b) Lunch meetings for brain-storming and ideation to developing proposal element.

B .  Rising FTE Star Award

1. Recognize Associate Members for their mentorship of SIRI students.
2. Nomination Call will come soon. (DEC 2018)

C. Competition for FTE-C2 Grants (each less than $2000) to enhance collaboration and competitiveness between members on existing projects. (SPRING 2019)

1. Push towards gathering more data, access instrumentation, additional experiments etc. for the goal to be more competitive in journal publications and/or grant funding.

After a short break, the Seed Grant Competition began and the groups presented their proposals.  The judging panel convened that evening and three grants were awarded.