The Office of the Vice President for Research has relaunched a digital hub for researchers across the University of Michigan to easily identify and apply for internal funding opportunities to advance their work.
OVPR first designed Research Commons in 2019 as part of a strategic, universitywide effort to centralize the visibility of internal funding opportunities. It now also indexes faculty honorifics, which include prestigious research-related medals, prizes and fellowships.
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OVPR launched a new Faculty Honorifics Office in 2023 to boost faculty visibility for external honorifics by increasing coordination across units, ensuring equitable nomination processes, and expanding the ability to track where and how U-M researchers are being recognized.
The revamped tool also includes limited submissions, which are funding opportunities where an external sponsor only allows a limited number of proposals from a given institution.
“We are constantly looking for new ways to support and catalyze research and creative practice across our three campuses, which is why we partnered with groups from across the University of Michigan to make Research Commons much more user friendly,” said Rebecca Cunningham, vice president for research and innovation.
“By aggregating these opportunities into one central hub, our researchers are now able to easily identify which ones are most applicable to them so they can focus their efforts on advancing critical work.”
More than 20 units from across U-M use InfoReady Review, a web-based competition platform, to help their researchers find and apply for internal funding opportunities.
OVPR created Research Commons to automatically pull all internal funding opportunities and limited submissions from across the various U-M InfoReady Review accounts, consolidating all applications into one single portal. In doing so, Research Commons eliminates the need for U-M researchers to navigate through multiple websites.
Over the past six months, OVPR has collaborated with U-M colleges, schools and units to enhance the digital tool’s usability and improve functionality.
The relaunched tool allows researchers to filter internal funding opportunities, honorifics and limited submissions based on keywords, fields of study and eligibility across the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses. Results can then be sorted by title or submission deadline dates.
