USC Office of Research

The USC Research Initiatives & Infrastructure (RII) Instrumentation Award Program intends to establish and bolster the University of Southern California’s infrastructure by supporting the purchase of shared instrumentation and further preparing faculty to submit large-scale instrumentation grants to external sponsors.

Scientific instruments are typically too expensive to be obtained by an individual investigator with a research project grant. This Request for Proposals supports the purchases of a single state-of-the-art commercially available instrument or an integrated instrumentation system to enhance research of university faculty, with the primary goal of expanding USC’s current institutional infrastructure. Every instrument awarded is to be used on a shared basis by multiple faculty, which makes the program cost-efficient and beneficial to multiple USC investigators. This allows the instrument to contribute to building the research infrastructure that benefits a team of researchers that may extend beyond a single USC school.

Such an expanded infrastructure will provide investigators who use the instrument the opportunity to generate data and publish scientific papers, thereby increasing the competitiveness of these investigators when pursing external funding opportunities. Therefore, the return of investment for this program is assumed to be the generation of data and resulting publications that will enable researchers to pursue research funding from federal agencies and other external sponsors. The Instrumentation Award includes two subprograms that are described below. All acquisition funds will be awarded after the completion of a competitive scientific peer review and a programmatic review.

Nomination Submission

Nominations must be submitted via our Grant Portal.
For additional information or inquiries, please contact us at rii@usc.edu.

Previous Awardees

Integrating sustainability as a core value in USC’s strategic planning is a critically important institutional commitment. In addition to implementing impactful sustainability initiatives across USC’s campuses, great opportunities exist to expand and enhance USC’s research strengths and capabilities in sustainability. 

The President’s Sustainability Research Award will provide seed funding to enable researchers to submit highly competitive applications for federal funding, including large center and related programs, early career awards, and individual research projects. The goal of using these funds is to maximize the probability of obtaining federal research support for the proposed effort. This is a one-time solicitation. While this program may be repeated, currently there are no plans to do so.

There are two types of awards under this program:
• Large Research Awards: $1,000,000 in funding is available to fund between 2-3 awards.
• Small Research Awards: $250,000 in funding is available to fund between 5-7 awards.

Nomination Submission

Nominations must be submitted via our Grant Portal.
For additional information or inquiries, please contact us at rii@usc.edu.

Previous Awardees

The USC Associates Awards are the highest honors the university can bestow on its members for their distinguished achievements. Faculty from all schools and academic units are strongly encouraged to nominate colleagues with exceptional records of creativity in research for the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship.

Creativity in research may stem from a single brilliant idea or from a significant body of work that forms a coherent whole, and may have significant impact on a field of scholarship, at the interface of disciplines, or create viable new areas of scholarly activity.

Nominators must be faculty members at USC. Student/Staff are ineligible to nominate. Nominees must be full professors who have been at USC for a minimum of five years. Tenure track and non- tenure track (NTT) full research professors are eligible; outstanding NTT faculty who make extraordinary contributions to the educational experience of students should be nominated to the Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Two awards of $3,500 each will be presented at the Academic Honors Convocation in April, 2023.

Nomination Submission

Nominations must be submitted via our Grant Portal.
For additional information or inquiries, please contact us at rii@usc.edu.

Previous Awardees

 The Ming Hsieh Institute for Research on Engineering-Medicine for Cancer (MHI) aims to make USC an international leader in translational research that bridges basic science, engineering, computing, and medicine. The MHI was established in 2010 through a generous gift from Ming Hsieh, a graduate of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, founder of Cogent Systems and Fulgent Genetics, USC Trustee, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. The central goal of the institute is integrated interdisciplinary translational research that speeds discovery and creates pathways to rapidly improving lives of patients. The MHI is strongly committed to supporting new and creative approaches and breakthrough interdisciplinary ideas that turn advances in engineering, computing, and science into treatments and cures. 

To encourage innovative and impactful research, the MHI recognizes the importance of supporting a broad research portfolio of targeted diseases within this solicitation, encompassing approaches that bridge science, engineering, computing, and medicine. To fulfill this aim, we seek proposals with novel therapeutic or diagnostic approaches to detect or treat disease. We seek proposals that will initiate multi-disciplinary research teams that partner engineering, computing, AI/machine learning, computational biology, physics, and/or chemistry with clinicians and biomedical researchers. 

Nomination Submission

Nominations must be submitted via our Grant Portal.
For additional information or inquiries, please contact us at rii@usc.edu.

Previous Awardees

Previous awardees can be found at Ming Hsieh Institute.