This year, UMBC's Office of Research Development introduced the new CIDER (Center and Institute Departmentally-Engaged Research) program. According to a recent UMBC article, "This internal funding opportunity brings together researchers from different disciplines and types of research units across UMBC."
Don Engel, Assoc. VP of Research Development and Director of CSST (among other roles), is one of the creators of CIDER. He explains, "People with their primary appointments in centers or institutes ... are eligible to be PIs on CIDER proposals. ... CIDER was designed specifically with them in mind. It does require that they have a secondary collaborator (a co-I) who is in a degree-granting department, as an additional purpose of CIDER is to support building bridges between centers/institutes and the rest of the university."
This initial group of awardees included four research teams who were each awarded a $50,000 CIDER grant for 18 months to pursue their studies. Among the awardees is the proposal "Model Development for Polarimetric Remote Sensing of Clouds in the Thermal Infrared," led by GESTAR II's Xiaoguang Xu (616/UMBC), with co-investigator Vanderlei Martins, professor of physics and GESTAR II member (613/UMBC), and Jie Gong, NASA.
Additionally, funding was awarded for the proposal "Harnessing the Power of Machine Learning to Discover What Powers Distant Galaxies" led by Antara Basu-Zych (662/UMBC/CSST II), with co-investigator Sanjay Purushotham, assistant professor of information systems, and Kristen Garofali, NASA. (Both GESTAR II and CSST II are managed by ESRA (Earth & Space Research Administration), part of UMBC's Office of Research and Creative Achievement.)
To learn more about this new and exciting funding opportunity, its development, and the other awardees, check out UMBC OIA's Adriana Fraser's article. Congratulations to all!
