OVPR Anschutz Pandemic Resilience and Graduate Fellowship Programs

Request for Proposals:

Accelerating Innovations through Interdisciplinary Teaming in Pandemic Disease Resilience and Countermeasure Agility

Proposals are due by 5:00 PM MT on August 31, 2021 through the CSU InfoReady Review System.

The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) is pleased to announce an internal request for proposals addressing Accelerating Innovations through Interdisciplinary Teaming in Pandemic Disease Resilience and Countermeasure Agility. This program will fund up to $1M in projects over 2 years ($150-200k per interdisciplinary team award). This opportunity is supported with generous funding provided by the The Anschutz Foundation, a private foundation anchored in Denver, Colorado.

Colorado State University’s research enterprise has made significant strategic investments in infectious disease research and response prior to the Pandemic including a new Program of Research Scholarly Excellence, Catalyst for Innovative Partnerships program investments, and cluster hires that have positioned CSU to be recognized as a top ten global research university in COVID response.

This work continues to attract sponsor interest and a recent fundraising success has resulted in this new funding opportunity. The OVPR will be selecting interdisciplinary teams that address new opportunities to increase both resilience in preparation for increased infectious disease outbreaks and agility in translating discoveries into practical applications that could be implemented quickly to produce countermeasures that would thwart widespread consequences of an outbreak, and that support the university’s priorities in creating and supporting diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities and activities. The interest landscape of this announcement is broad, given the many opportunities to increase resilience and agility in response, and includes but is not limited to the following topics:

  • Enhanced disease surveillance and early warning – digital tools for enhanced data integration and analysis; multiplexed biological data such as sequence, protein, or other biomarkers; and biosensor signals for enhanced situational awareness
  • Agile and broad-spectrum countermeasures – host based therapeutic; just-in-time manufacturing; fast and affordable field based diagnostics or sensors; social science or behavioral opportunities to enhance adoption; and practices, understanding, and communication of countermeasures

The OVPR will execute this program using a model similar to the Catalyst for Innovative Partnerships program, which has been successful in building strategic teams of high impact. Awarded teams will be provided additional resources through the OVPR to optimize success including support and training in team science and facilitation of team impacts with extramural sponsors and investors.

This request for proposals seeks to invest in established interdisciplinary teams focused on innovations that can be developed for application in infectious disease outbreaks, with anticipated impacts ranging from the local to global scale. Successful projects will clearly result in demonstrable impacts in preparedness, agility in response, or resiliency in future infectious disease outbreaks or pandemics.

This program will prioritize investing in established research teams with demonstrable track records of impact that will address key areas of need and gaps as identified in the COVID-19 response.

Request for Proposals:

A New Anschutz Graduate Fellowship Program to Create the Next Generation Workforce for Resilient and Agile Solutions to Pandemics and Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Proposals are due by 5:00 PM MT on September 1, 2021 through the CSU InfoReady Review System.

The recent COVID Pandemic has highlighted key gaps in our understanding and ability to respond to fast moving events led by interactions of pathogens in our environment. The intersection of animal, human and environmental health is a particular area of future investment in building resilience and agility to respond to future infectious disease outbreaks that could lead to the next pandemic.

This request for proposals seeks to invest in interdisciplinary areas of graduate research that are focused on innovations that could be developed to build resilience and agility to infectious disease outbreaks that could have impacts from Colorado to global disease, as pathogens know no boundaries of continents or countries. The interdisciplinary thematic focus is on funding projects that address agility and resilience in responding to the next infectious disease outbreak or pandemic.

We are interested in investing in graduate researchers (PhD or Masters) that are addressing key areas identified in the COVID response as areas of need. These include:

  1. Building Resilience Through Predictive Outcome of Impact: Outbreak research and development and include areas of interest including disease diagnostics and epidemiological surveillance in animal or human populations, data sharing and integration, and predictive modeling for health, economic and community outcomes.
  2. Creating Agile Platforms for Medical Countermeasures: Development of medical countermeasures (vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics) utilizing platforms that can cover a broad spectrum against many pathogens or pathogen strains. We are also interested in innovations that can address agile or distributive manufacturing of medical countermeasures through rapid prototyping and/or other medical innovations.
  3. Understanding social and cultural aspects of infectious disease outbreak response and adoption of countermeasure practices and solutions: The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that technological solutions are not sufficient to drive solutions that resolve or prevent future outbreaks. This area of focus recognizes areas of impact that includes socioeconomic, cultural and social aspects of creating resilience and agility to the next outbreak and address equitable solutions to the health and well-being of our citizens and communities.

This opportunity is supported with generous funding provided by the The Anschutz Foundation, a private foundation anchored in Denver, Colorado.