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 secured $9,471,347 of external research funding, with an additional $16,437,937 of external grant proposals under review. Furthermore, seven new NIH grant proposals (3 R01s,  1 R21, and 3 R03s) are to be submitted in the spring of 2024. The seed grant awardees and applicants have become a major driving force of the collegiate research enterprise.

“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.