Fourteen highly-innovative projects have been chosen for the first round of funding by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education for the UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative. Sifting through more than 130 proposals from across the UW-Madison campus, reviewers identified ambitious, early stage research ideas and infrastructure investments in an effort to jump-start innovative interdisciplinary research projects that might otherwise not be funded through traditional funding mechanisms.
The projects span the disciplines, with successful proposals ranging from studies of the increasingly complex makeup of the modern family to the creation of an atlas of the metabolic pathways of Alzheimer’s disease.
The projects were reviewed by faculty from across the university, ultimately involving 87 reviewers. Funded projects include 72 faculty and academic staff investigators from eight schools and colleges. Final selections were made by the UW2020 Council, a group of 16 faculty from all divisions of the university. They evaluated the merits of each project based on the reviews and their potential for making significant contributions.
