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.

2020 Recipients: For the twelve researchers whose projects were funded in 2020, they submitted a total of 10 R01 grant proposals, 3 R21 grant proposals, and 4 R03 grant proposals since January 2021. The collegiate administration is proud of the success of the seed program thus far and fully expects the success to continue. One of these researchers, Kyungsup Shin have since secured major R01 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to support their projects. Another recipient, Cristina Vidal, who received additional support in 2021 from the Seed Grant Program secured a career development grant from the NIH.

2021 Recipients: For the ten researchers whose projects were funded in 2021, they submitted a total of 6 R01 grant proposals, including 1 recently funded for Shaoping Zhang with Co-Investigator Hongli Sun, 2 R21 grant proposals, 2 R03 grant proposals, and 3 Foundation grants, including 1 funded for I-Ching “Izzie” Wang from Osteology Foundation since January 2022.

“The on-going success of our past recipients is a testament to the college’s major investment in growing its research profile,” said Associate Dean Xie.

Because of the college’s commitment to its research mission, the College of Dentistry was ranked 10th in the country in 2020, and 2nd in the Big 10, with over $6.4M in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) funding. Since then, the college's external funding has further increased with almost $9.5M in 2022.