Early Funding for Big Ideas

Hospitals produce an enormous amount of plastic waste — what if it were biodegradable?

Brain tumors vary widely from one person to the next — what if treatment were personalized for each patient?

Rare earth metals are vital, but our supplies are in jeopardy — what if they were easier to extract and refine?

These are just a few of the dozens of challenges that researchers at Columbia Engineering are tackling through support from the School’s most recent class of seed funding, announced earlier this year. 

“Funding at key stages in the research pipeline, particularly at the early stage involving cross-disciplinary collaborations or technology translation from labs to practice, is critical for our faculty to develop and test ideas with truly transformative potential,” said Dean of Columbia Engineering Shih-Fu Chang. “We want to provide as many mechanisms as possible to support the world-class research being done in our labs.”

These awards are distributed through several research centers and school-level mechanisms, and they support both PI-led research projects and PhD fellowships. Columbia Engineering’s SIRS program, now in its 10th year, supports early-stage interdisciplinary research projects, and the STAR program, now in its eighth year, assists later-stage projects to translate basic research to real-world implementation. The Qiu Zhong Wei Research Project Fund supports projects in the areas of sustainable materials, sustainable mining, and advanced materials for energy storage. The Avanessians Doctoral Fellows program supports PhD students from any engineering discipline whose work intersects with data science. 

Several industry- and government-funded research centers also awarded funding as part of this cycle. These include:

• The Center for AI and Responsible Financial Innovation (CAIRFI), a partnership between Columbia and Capital One that aims to accelerate research, education, and the responsible advancement of state-of-the-art AI in financial services;
• The Center of AI Technologies (CAIT), a collaboration with Amazon was established with a mission to better society through the development and adoption of advanced AI technology;
• The Center for Digital Finance and Technologies seeks to advance the digital transformation of financial services for higher efficiency and security, increased accessibility, and greater social responsibility;
• The Columbia-Dream Sports AI Innovation Center, which leverages Columbia Engineering’s expertise in AI, ML, and Engineering, and Dream Sports’s experience in sports and games technologies to advance research and workforce development at the intersection of AI, ML, and sports tech; and
• The Cyber NYC Institutional Research and Education program engages faculty, students, and industry experts in shaping the future of cybersecurity in NYC.

“Our research ecosystem of faculty, centers, and institutes would not be possible without the support of our generous donors and our partners and collaborators in industry and government,” said Vice Dean for Research George Deodatis, who is also the Santiago and Robertina Calatrava Family Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and a professor of earth and environmental engineering. “We strongly encourage our faculty to take advantage of these funding opportunities to support their efforts in tackling some of the biggest challenges of our time.” 

Please visit the Columbia Engineering Research Funding page for more information about how to apply for these and other funding opportunities.

Lead Photo Caption: Students pictured in Tal Danino's Synthetic Biological Systems lab
Lead Photo Credit: John Abbott