University of Michigan faculty from the Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses can now request seed funding for cross-campus research teams through MCubed.
“We are proud to welcome UM-Dearborn’s talented faculty into MCubed. Dearborn’s strengths in applied research and longstanding partnerships in metropolitan Detroit offer tremendous assets to our university as a whole,” said President Mark Schlissel.
“I look forward to seeing faculty working together across our Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses.”
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MCubed, a first-of-its-kind program that has attracted national attention, distributes seed funding to trios of faculty that include at least two different campus units. Faculty use MCubed to go forward with innovative ideas that require an interdisciplinary approach, and which may be too risky and untested for more traditional funding mechanisms.
MCubed itself relies on a core innovation — a departure from conventional peer review, which can result in long delays before faculty can proceed with novel research and scholarship. It substitutes a “pure” form of peer review by distributing one virtual token to every faculty user in the MCubed website and posting project concepts for all 5,500 faculty in the system to see.
Accordingly, faculty members must make strategic decisions about which project is worthy of investing their token in the two-year funding cycle.
Up to this point, the program has been available only to faculty at the Ann Arbor campus.
The UM-Dearborn faculty’s presence in the MCubed system comes just in time for the next major cube distribution event, to occur later in April.
During the next two weeks, faculty from Ann Arbor and Dearborn can post project ideas, reach out to potential collaborators, and form multi-unit teams of three. The project creator can then officially ask for a cube, which triggers a request for seed funding.
The deadline for requesting funding is April 21.
With project concepts emerging on topics such as gender and STEM disciplines, law enforcement drones and psychological contracts, faculty from Ann Arbor and Dearborn are poised to collaborate.
Samir Rawashdeh, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering of UM-Dearborn, has already posted two project concepts on the MCubed website and is waiting to see which one attracts more faculty interest.
“I am strategizing about which project to push forward,” said Rawashded. “There is a learning curve with MCubed, and I was wondering how it works with the absence of traditional peer review. But now that I use it, I see that every faculty must be selective in the use of their token, which raises the quality of each project.”
Depending on the scope and nature of the innovative project, faculty can request a classic cube worth $60,000, or a mini-cube worth $15,000.
Each “cube,” or group of three faculty members, invests 50 percent of its funding in the next generation of researchers and scholars, building a broader team that includes postdoctoral fellows, graduate students or undergraduate students.
Each cube must engage in new research or scholarship. MCubed’s definition of “new” is that the three faculty collaborators on the cube cannot simultaneously be on the same externally funded grant project.
To date, MCubed has distributed 400 cubes across both of its cycles. The inaugural cycle, extending from 2012-14, included 222 cubes, which have since reported securing $33 million in external funding.
Seventy-five cubes have submitted or published results in peer-reviewed journals, with 42 cubes achieving other products, such as digital archives, artistic productions or conference presentations.
The success of MCubed to date has motivated the MCubed Executive Committee and staff team to explore expansions of the program, including the incorporation of U-M regional campuses, says Mark Burns, T.C. Chang professor of engineering and director of MCubed.
“Given that MCubed involves intellectual property, technology, finance and many other aspects of campus infrastructure, it’s been complex to add another campus to the MCubed system,” Burns said. “But it has been hugely rewarding to collaborate with Dearborn leaders to bring the talent, energy, and creativity of their faculty to bear on interdisciplinary research challenges.”
“Solutions for some of the most vexing problems, as well as some of the most promising opportunities, reside at disciplinary intersections,” said UM-Dearborn Provost Kate Davy.
“Those best suited to address problems and seize opportunities are teams of faculty who hail from diverse backgrounds and bring with them the confidence to embrace breadth and build partnerships across other fields.”
To equip faculty teams for capitalizing on this opportunity, MCubed has offered several information sessions on the Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses. All faculty and staff are welcome to attend the next session from 10-11:30 a.m., April 13 at Forum Hall in Palmer Commons.
MCubed is part of the Third Century Initiative, launched by the offices of the president and provost, and is located in the Office of Research.
