SUBJECT:

Funding Opportunity-Microbial Sciences Graduate Research Fellowships

The Microbial Sciences Graduate Research Initiative is pleased to invite applications for graduate research fellowships to investigate microbes, their communities, and the organisms they interact with, on multiple scales, from molecules to populations. This effort is part of the Microbiome and Microbial Sciences Initiative that is co-directed by Rob Knight and Kit Pogliano, which seeks to accelerate the multidisciplinary research necessary to achieve a mechanistic understanding of microbial cells and communities and to translate this knowledge into discoveries that benefit society. We seek to support new, potentially high risk, collaborative research projects, as well as efforts to collect the preliminary data necessary to enable funding from external agencies, and to provide a mechanism to support graduate students who work with faculty in diverse disciplines.

We will be offering support via three distinct mechanisms.

1. Graduate fellowships: Support for graduate student-led interdisciplinary research projects. Applications are open to UC San Diego graduate students interested in pursuing an interdisciplinary thesis project or who wish to add an interdisciplinary component to their current thesis project.

2. Pilot projects: Support for new collaborative research projects. We will provide funding for collaborative grant applications in the microbial sciences that were reviewed favorably but not funded, to allow investigators to collect preliminary data required for a successful resubmission.

3. Support for graduate student-led Center for Microbiome Innovation seed grants. UC San Diego students who apply for seed funding (http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/microbiome/grant_form.sfe) from the Center for Microbiome Innovation (http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/microbiome/index.shtml), are invited to simultaneously apply for one quarter of stipend support from the Microbial Sciences Graduate Research Initiative.

For further information about the types of fellowships available and how to apply, visit (http://media.biology.ucsd.edu/tmpdocs/MSIFellowships2017Feb1.pdf).

Please submit questions and comments to MSI@ucsd.edu.

Kit Pogliano Co-Director, Microbial Sciences Initiative Professor and Chair, Section of Molecular Biology Division of Biological Sciences Sandra A Brown Vice Chancellor for Research Affairs