Seed and travel grants support collaborative, multi-institutional research with impact.
CHICAGO — Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), part of the University of Illinois System, and Cardiff University (CU) announced their second annual joint seed and travel grants for 2025.
First awarded in 2024 and jointly administered by DPI and Cardiff University, the funds support research and travel. Each university awards up to $40,000 (and the equivalent in GBP) per project in seed grants, designed to jump-start research projects in a wide range of disciplines. Grantees are required to submit reports on their work after six months and one year.
Travel grants of $5,000 (and the equivalent in GBP) per project allow PIs to travel between Cardiff and Illinois for projects demonstrating innovative, impactful collaboration opportunities.
“In order to tackle global challenges, you need global partnerships,” said Phil Stephens, Cardiff University’s International Dean for the Americas. “Our strong, trans-Atlantic UK-US partnership is supporting our staff and students in engaging interdisciplinary approaches to deliver tangible benefits for our global ecosystems.”
A few of the first cycle of grantees from 2024 have obtained preliminary results on their work and presented them in a virtual meeting of seed grant recipients from both cycles.
Jack Baker, a research associate in optoelectronics at CU’s School of Physics and Astronomy, used his 2024 travel grant to visit the UIUC campus last fall and present his research on Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser semiconductors and photonics.
DPI Research Associate Anuj Tiwari and Diana Contreras, a lecturer in geospatial sciences at Cardiff University, presented their seed-grant–funded research on a holistic mental health assessment app at Cardiff University in July 2024.
“Fostering this kind of cross-institutional, international collaboration is so important to address real-world challenges,” said Venkat Venkatakrishnan, DPI’s director of research. “We are proud to continue to support a broad range of topics in these grants, including applications of artificial intelligence as well as quantum computing.”
Seed grant awardees:
- Developing Cubic III-nitride Semiconductors for a Sustainable Future: Can Bayram (UIUC) and Naresh-Kumar Gunasekar (CU)
- Quantum Sensing with Lasers: Kent Choquette (UIUC) and Samuel Shutts (CU)
- XAI-CA, Explainable AI via Computational Argumentation: Martin Caminada (CU) and Bertram Ludäscher (UIUC)
- IHeatRisk, an individual heat risk toolkit: Gavin Shaddick (CU), and Anuj Tiwari (DPI)
Travel grant awardees:
- Transatlantic Chamber Music: Arlene Sierra (CU) and Ben Roidl-Ward (UIUC)
- Landfill Biocovers: Arif Mohammad (CU) and Krishna Reddy (UIC)
- Graph Neural Networks for Credit Risk and Contagion Analysis: Umeorah Nneka (CU) and Tolulope Fadina (UIUC)
- Plasmonic Nanomaterials for Sustainable Energy Applications: Sankar Meenakshisundaram (CU) and Paul Braun (UIUC)
- Numerical Relativity for Next-Generation Gravitational-Wave Observatories: Mark Hannam (CU) and Helvi Witek (UIUC)
- Semiochemicals for Attraction of Mosquitos: Ruchika Geedi (CU) and Adam Dolezal (UIUC)
- Challenges and Solutions in Public Sector Capital Investment: Dennis De Widt (CU) and Deborah Carroll (UIC)
- Patent Drafting with Large Language Models: Sourav Medya (UIC)
The next application window opens in the fall of 2025.