Seed Grant Program

The University of Iowa College of Dentistry and Dental Clinics seed grant program provides funds for:

• innovative projects from early-career investigators, or
• established investigators who are developing a new line of research.

The goal of these grants is to encourage research and generate data that will enable the awardees to be competitive for peer-reviewed national funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health.

Program Success

The program has been extremely successful thus far.

Since 2020, Seed Grant awardees have well over $10 million of external research funding. The seed grant awardees and applicants have become a major driving force of the collegiate research enterprise.

Because of the college’s commitment to its research mission, the College of Dentistry is ranked 13th in the country in the most recently NIDCR rankings with over $4.8M in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) funding.

A recent example of this success is Dr. Ariene Leme Kraus, who received a seed grant award in 2024, and was able to secure an R03 award for the project in 2025. Dr. Leme Kraus success exemplifies the kind of success that the seed grant program is designed to support.