“Think, Collaborate & Do” Seed Funding Proposals

Project proposals are due October 10th (new due date), 2025. Please submit proposals using the form below.

• ~$200,000 in seed funding for faculty
  • Maximum award $50K, minimum is $15K
  • Expecting to fund 5-7 projects
• Up to $20,000 for graduate students & postdocs
  • Up to 4 awards of $5,000 each
• Up to 2 CATALYZE entrepreneurship supplements
  • $2,500 per award plus business advice/mentoring/networking
• In addition to interdisciplinary seed grants, program project planning grants are also considered and encouraged. For program project planning grants, please describe targeted future funding opportunities and a brief outline of how the CMI award would be used to support application development. 
• Optional supplements for Genetics & Genomics Academy (GGA) and ICoNS/ASSIST

• Faculty Format Think, Collaborate & Do Proposal Format
• Associate Member Think, Collaborate & Do Proposal Format

CMI Ideation Event

Each year, the CMI holds the “Think, Collaborate & Do” Ideation event. This event invites faculty, graduate students and postdocs from all departments and colleges who have an interest in human and animal health to display a research summary poster that will allow them to make connections with potential collaborators they wouldn’t otherwise have met. They then form groups to come up with big, bold, new ideas in areas of focus to the CMI that become research proposals for the Ideation Awards. Below are examples of previous awards and instructions for this year’s event.

“Think, Collaborate & Do” 2025

Friday, August 15th, 2025

8:00 a.m.-12:50 p.m.

Friday Institute for Educational Innovation

This year’s event will again be a combined event with the Research & Education Summit, with “Think, Collaborate & Do” in the morning and the Summit in the afternoon.

To participate in the morning event you must register and have a research summary poster to attend. Please look carefully at the sample posters. These are not traditional posters but specifically designed for this event. Examples are provided for single labs as well a group of faculty. Digital poster uploads are due by Friday, August 8th. Please bring your hard-copy posters with you to the event.

We are also seeking Associate Member volunteers to help run the event. To find out more or to sign up, use the “Volunteer” button below, or contact Valerie Baker at valerie.baker@ncsu.edu.

Posters should be 24×36″ with a portrait orientation. Please also include a photo of yourself (if a group, the photo of the person to talk to during the event) so that others can recognize you at the event. Templates available at the links below. Please note that these templates are only examples. Use whichever template fits your research best, and feel free to modify as appropriate as long as the meet the overall content format (simple and general).

Free poster printing offered to the first 15-20 graduate students and postdocs who sign up and upload their posters via the above registration form by Friday, August 8th, if they do not have access to poster printing by any other means.

“Think, Collaborate & Do” Agenda

• 8:00-8:30 Coffee, Sign-in & poster setup
• 8:30-9:00 Welcome & Intro
• 9:00-10:50 Learn & Mingle
• 10:50-11:20 Ideate, Consolidate & Finalize
• 11:20-11:30 Q&A, Closing Comments
• 11:30-12:50 Lunch, Guest Speaker Keynote Address

Please Note: The Friday Institute has ample free parking for event attendees. However, please be aware of school-time traffic at the adjacent middle school.

Keynote Speaker: Ankur Singh

Ankur Singh is a Carl Ring Family Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. At Georgia Tech, he serves as the Director of the Center for Immunoengineering. Before Georgia Tech, he was a tenured Associate Professor at Cornell University.  He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. His laboratory develops immune organoids and enabling technologies to understand both healthy and diseased immune cells and translate these findings into therapeutics. He has received funding from the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Wellcome Leap HOPE, Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Curci Foundation, and the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society. He has published >80 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Methods, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Materials, Nature Protocols, Science Advances, Cell Reports, PNAS, Blood, and Advanced Materials. He has written multiple editorials for Science Translational Medicine. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER, Society for Biomaterials Mid Career Award, Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, CMBE Young Innovator Award, CMBE Rising Star Award, 3M Faculty Award, DoD Career award, Georgia Tech CIOS Teaching Award, Cornell’s Teaching Excellence Award, and Cornell’s Research Excellence Award. His immune organoids were identified among the Top 100 Discoveries of 2015 by Discover Magazine. He is the Founder and past Chair of the Immune Engineering SIG at the Society for Biomaterials and Controlled Release Society. He currently serves as the Associate Editor for Science Advances, Biomaterials, and Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering. Dr. Singh serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Chicago Biohub.

Keynote Title: Revolutionizing Immunotherapy: Bioengineered Immune Organs and Nanoscale Technologies

The human immune system is a marvel of biological complexity, yet its dysfunction underlies numerous diseases. Designing vaccines, immunomodulatory drugs, and cell therapies against infections, cancer, inflammatory conditions, and age-related disorders requires a detailed understanding of how immune cells form and activate in primary, secondary, and ectopic tertiary immune organs. Traditionally, research on the immune system has been restricted to in vivo approaches, which do not allow for the detailed control of intracellular and extracellular processes, and to 2D in vitro models, which lack physiological relevance. These models are being investigated to understand immune function and dysfunction at the cellular, tissue, and organ levels. In this talk, I will discuss my laboratory’s effort in developing synthetic, human ex vivo immune organoids to replicate the structure and function of immune tissues. I will discuss strategies to combine engineered materials and immune cells from individuals to generate antibody-secreting cells in a dish or as organ-on-chip against viral and bacterial infections and describe immunogenicity testing efforts. I will further describe the use of human immune organoids in oncology and drug development space, and subsequently describe the integration of immune organoids with complex mucosal organ-on-chip technologies, with applications in inflammation, infection, and oncology. Complementing this, I will introduce nanoengineered wires functionalized with cationic polymers to program naive T cells without pre-activation, a critical advancement for adoptive T-cell therapies. By delivering single or multiple microRNAs, I will describe how nanowires modulate T-cell fitness, influencing proliferation, phenotypic differentiation, and effector molecule secretion. These programmed T cells exhibit enhanced in vivo protection against intracellular pathogens, with tailored differentiation into T cell subtypes.

Ideation Award Information

• Faculty Awards:
  • Up to $200,000 in awards
  • Max award amount of $50,000
    • Minimum reward amount of $15,000
  • 5-7 expected awards for 2025
• Graduate Students and Postdocs
  • Up to $20,000 in awards
  • $5,000 per award
  • Up to 4 proposals will be funded
• CATALYZE Entrepreneurship Awards
  • Up to two teams will be awarded
  • $2,500 per award, plus access to business advice, networking, and mentoring
• Additional awards will be awarded in co-sponsorship with ASSIST, the Genetics & Genomics Academy (GGA), & IConS

Not sure what an Ideation event is? Here’s how it works (Additional information in video link below):

Register to attend:	Submit your research summary poster Preview others’ posters electronically.
Learn & Mingle:	Posters will be displayed unattended to allow browsing Leave your contact info for those you’d like to meet.
Ideate & Consolidate:	Join groups and exchange ideas.
Finalize your ideas:	Plan follow-up meetings & write your proposal

2024-2025 Faculty Awards:

• Enhancing Development of New Therapeutic Candidates for Neutrophilic Asthma through Experimental and Mathematical Modeling Approaches. PIs: Sarah Shelton (COE), Rosemary Bayless (CVM), Sharon Lubkin (COS). Funded by CMI, COE, & KIETS.
• Machine Learning to the Rescue: Data-Driven Prediction of Radiotherapy-Induced Normal Tissue Injury in Canine Cancer Treatment. PIs: S. Mohammad Hosseinian (COE), Michael Nolan (CVM). Funded by CMI, COE, & KIETS.
• Integrating Sequence, Structure, and Dynamics to Predict and Design Nucleic Acids. PIs: Xingcheng Lin (COS), Keith Weninger (COS), Yi Xiao (COS). Funded by CMI, GGA, & KIETS.
• Modeling cellular response to fibrous biomaterial properties for skin tissue engineering. PIs: Jessica Gluck (WCOT), Nathaniel Josephs (COS), Orlando Arguello-Miranda (CALS). Funded by CMI, WCOT, & KIETS.
• Development of DRIFT Therapy to Boost Pulmonary Drug Delivery. PIs: Jian Zhang (CVM), Zixuan Cang (COS). Funded by CMI, with an entrepreneurial supplement.
• A Field-Deployable CRISPR Diagnostic Platform for Early Canine Cancer Detection. PIs: Qingshan Wei (COE), Matthew Breen (CVM). Funded by GGA & private donations.
• Defining and Targeting Cancer-Associated Fibroblasts in the Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Tumor Microenvironment. PIs: Sarah Shelton (COE), Shawn Gomez (COE/UNC). Funded by CMI & KIETS.
• Cell Biology and Topology Meet to Inform Models of Cell Migration Fluidization. PIs: Jason Haugh (COE), Kevin Flores (COS). Funded by CMI & KIETS.
• Accelerating the Discovery of Functional lncRNAs with Large Language Models. PIs: Xinxia Peng (CVM), Xiaorui Liu (COE). Funded by CMI.
• Data-driven causal discovery of cell-cell communication impacts from transcriptomic data: recovering signaling mechanisms of lung development. PIs: Zixuan Cang (COS), Shu Yang (COS), Jorge Piedrahita (CVM). Funded by CMI & GGA.
• Innovative computational methods to decipher cell cycle dynamics from single cell transcriptomes of easily cultured, yet complex eukaryotes. PIs: Nicholas Buchler (CVM), Zixuan Cang (COS). Funded by CMI & GGA.
• High-Throughput Engineering of Activatable Human Kinases. PIs: Albert Keung (COE), Klaus Hahn (UNC), Balaji Rao (COE). Funded by CMI.
• Transcatheter injectable biomaterial for next generation tumor embolization.PIs: Jingjie Hu (COE), Jessica Gluck (WCOT), Ashley Brown (COE). Funded by CMI & COE.
• Investigation of Ultrasound Medullary Rim Signs as an Early Imaging Biomarker for CKD in Cats. PIs: Kennita Johnson (COE), Shelly Vaden (CVM), Autumn Harris (CVM), Gabi Seiler (CVM). Funded by CVM.

2024-2025 Student Awards:

• Tracking DNA-Targeting Chemotherapeutics in Cancer Cells Using Single-Molecule Imaging. PIs: Md Abul Shahid (WCOT), Ummay Mowshome Jahan (WCOT), Md Arifuzzaman (COS). Funded by CMI.
• Leveraging bioinformatics to explore the gut-lung axis in foals with neonatal sepsis. PIs: Megan Palmisano (CVM), Taylor Gin (CVM). Funded by CMI.

Questions?

Still have questions about “Think, Collaborate & Do?” View the info session recording below (ncsu.edu email required).

Other Funding Opportunities Outside of this Event:

• Research Focus Area-specific opportunities: These seed grants vary year-to-year and are at the discretion of each area’s Associate Directors. Join the CMI & your preferred focus area to be notified when these awards are announced.
• Young Scholar Program (YSP) / Summer Interdisciplinary Research Initiative (SIRI) awards: Annually each fall semester. Graduate students & postdocs create interdisciplinary projects and select undergraduate students as lab assistants mentees. Details here & here.
• CATALYZE Entrepreneurship & Commercialization opportunities: Visit the Entrepreneurship page to learn more about the CATALYZE startup pitch contest, the Business and Medicine (BaM) program, and more.

A big thank you to all who made these 2024-2025 awards possible, including CMI’s CATALYZE program, Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology & Science (KIETS), the Genetics & Genomics Academy (GGA), the College of Engineering, & Wilson College of Textiles.