Research Corporation - Grants Programs: Cottrell College Science Awards

Grants Programs: Cottrell College Science Awards

The Cottrell College Science Awards (CCSA) program, RCSA’s oldest initiative, was created in the early 1970s to promote basic research as a vital component of undergraduate education at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). CCSA has supported the research work of more than 1,300 PUI faculty in more than 400 institutions, and has generated research opportunities for thousands of undergraduates at both public and private institutions. One of RCSA’s important goals is to motivate students to pursue careers in research and to become the advanced scientific workforce America will need to remain prosperous and safe in the challenging decades to come.

Cottrell College Science Awards are intended to: • Strengthen teacher-scholars while supporting high-quality research at primarily undergraduate institutions; • Help early-career PUI faculty become competitive for federal funding; • Encourage faculty to conduct meaningful collaborative work with undergraduate researchers, and; • Enhance the research culture of science departments at public and private institutions in the U.S.

The CCSA Single-Investigator Award provides research support for early-career faculty with interests in the fields of chemistry, physics and astronomy and in closely related fields that overlap significantly with these three disciplines. RCSA also has a new initiative under the CCSA banner, the Multi-Investigator Awards, to encourage early-career faculty to establish in-house, interdisciplinary research collaborations. This was done to encourage PUI-based researchers to address the increasingly complex problems inherent in modern scientific inquiry.