A five-year, $30 million investment into bold research and scholarship from the University of Michigan and its faculty members has tripled into a return of nearly $100 million in follow-on funding.

The one-of-a-kind Mcubed program is designed to spark innovative projects without traditional review. It rapidly gives seed funding — either at a $60,000 or $15,000 level — with no questions asked to teams of three professors who represent at least two different disciplines.

MCubed shortcuts the conventional grant review process that faculty members say slows progress and can prove too big a hurdle for a new team with a big idea to clear.

At the initiative’s 2017 symposium Wednesday, President Mark Schlissel announced that MCubed would continue for another three-year cycle — its third since launching in 2012. In this next cycle, UM-Flint will join U-M’s Ann Arbor campus and UM-Dearborn.

The third cycle of MCubed will open for funding in fall 2018.

“There is no shortage of creativity among our faculty, and MCubed helps to unleash their ambition more quickly across all disciplines,” Schlissel said. “As a 200-year-old public university with outstanding academic breadth, we have the potential to be so much more than the sum of our many excellent parts. We need our best artists, humanists, scientists, teachers and others to pursue knowledge that will change society for the better.”

In each cycle of MCubed, the Provost’s Office contributes $5 million. This funding stimulates investments by colleges, schools or departments, and participating faculty members that has historically totaled an additional $10 million.

Since the program began, it has jumpstarted:

• 476 interdisciplinary projects.

• $90 million in external grants and $4 million in internal funding so far. MCubed’s second cycle doesn’t end until Dec. 31.

• More than 225 studies published in peer-reviewed journals.

• More than 60 additional products including companies, conference presentations, websites, artistic exhibitions and community outreach.

• 16 invention reports.

MCubed has also involved 1,553 undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, all of whom have been trained to work across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

“We’ve seen an incredible amount of pent up creative energy released into results,” said Mcubed Managing Director Valerie Johnson. “For faculty, this program is allowing them to return to the love of discovery that drove them to their field in the first place.”

Here are some examples of projects and successes:

• MCubed catalyzed what’s now a $9 million, National Institutes of Health project using data science to predict patients’ risks of developing hospital-borne Clostridium difficile infections.

C. difficile is usually kept out of the gut by normal bacteria. However, antibiotics can wreak collateral damage on these normal bacterial, leaving patients susceptible to C. difficile, which can exist in hospitals. Once acquired, this difficult-to-treat infection can cause serious damage to the colon.

An internal medicine physician, a computer scientist and a genomic epidemiologist had been considering submitting a proposal to NIH when they formed their Mcubed project. They used the seed funding to demonstrate that their team had a history.

“MCubed was the spark that made it happen,” said Vincent Young, the William Henry Fitzbutler Collegiate Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease, and professor of microbiology and immunology.

“Whenever the NIH considers you, they want to see where you’re at, and we could show that we’d started to do work. We had hired someone to look at the data already. They liked that. It really gave us a head start.”

• Two screen arts and cultures professors and a special collections librarian are building an annotated digital archive edition of world-renowned filmmaker Orson Welles’ unproduced first screenplay, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

“Its themes of power and race are as relevant for today’s world as they were for the world of 1939,” said Matthew Solomon, associate professor of screen arts and cultures in LSA.

The team, which also includes a Ph.D. student and 10 undergraduates, aims to create an annotated critical edition of the screenplay supplemented by archival materials that put it in context — correspondence, interviews, production records and audiovisual material. U-M holds the world’s largest, most comprehensive Welles collection.

“Although we all share a passion for research and creating new knowledge about media history, we never would have had the opportunity to forge a multigenerational collaboration such as ours without the institutional framework and the material support provided by the MCubed program,” Solomon said.

• A six-member “supercube” of engineers, a hydrogeologist and a sustainable systems scientist got together in the first MCubed cycle to study hydraulic fracturing, water contamination and the fate of the fracturing fluids that are used in the process. At the time, these faculty members were some of the first to examine the environmental and public health effects of this widespread approach to natural gas extraction.

“I arrived on campus and had some initial conversations with potential collaborators and Mcubed provided immediate funding to jump after our ideas,” said Brian Ellis, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, who was a new faculty member at the time.

“A lot of times you have conversations with colleagues and say, ‘We should go after this,’ but the time and effort required to put a full proposal together doesn’t match up with your available time.”

The funding led to new research directions, a $350,000 grant from NSF and several research papers. Most recently, Ellis and collaborator Shelie Miller, Jonathan W. Bulkley Collegiate Professor of Sustainable Systems, and associate professor of environment and sustainability and of civil and environmental engineering, published findings showing that electricity produced from shale natural gas has much lower public health impacts than electricity produced from coal.

Mcubed was conceived and implemented by a group of faculty leaders from across the university, including Mark Burns, who now is executive director of MCubed and Research Innovation in the Office of Research, as well as the T.C. Chang Professor of Engineering. To put it in place, they had to convince all of U-M’s 19 schools and colleges to participate. That wasn’t easy considering that a cornerstone of the program was the lack of a formal review process.

“At first some deans said, ‘Can’t we just judge the projects?'” Burns recalled. “But how can you tell which ones will succeed and which ones won’t? It’s very hard to judge new and creative work, and I think that bears out in our traditional funding system.

“If your work hits on a new topic, half of your reviewees might say, ‘No, we don’t believe this can be done,’ and the other half might say, ‘Excellent! This is new!’ but you don’t get the funding. We started Mcubed so we could give truly innovative research a jumpstart.”

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