Through the Collaborative Research Grant program, the Rhode Island Science & Technology Advisory Council (STAC) makes available funding to support multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary projects that focus on building research capacity and infrastructure across institutions to advance the competitiveness of Rhode Island researchers.

The 2014 Collaborative Research Grant call for proposals will be posted this week on the STAC website with the following important dates:

• Pre-proposals are due Sept. 27, 2013

• Invited full proposals due Oct. 30, 2013

The Collaborative Research Grant program is in support of STAC’s partnership with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) and seeks projects that align with Rhode Island NSF EPSCoR’s thematic research areas of marine life response and adaptation to climate change.

Approximately $800,000 in competitive funding is offered to support proposals that address any of the three EPSCoR research questions related to the overarching question of this agreement: “What are the impacts of climate change on marine life?”

• What are the stress responses and evolutionary potentials of marine organisms in response to climate change?

• How are the structure and function of coastal marine food-webs and biogeochemical cycling being redirected in response to climate change?

• How will global climate change affect the ecology of marine pathogens and parasites?

Proposals are preferred if they include use of Core Facilities in Proteomics, Genomics & Sequencing (at Brown and URI) and in Marine Life Sciences (URI, Bay Campus).