ColColorado State University is committed to supporting a wide range of activities across research, scholarship, and creative activity. The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) will utilize the Quarterly Strategic Investment process for managing funding requests from colleges, departments, and other units. A major advantage of this process is the allocation of available funds across the fiscal year to ensure that support for needs can be consistently made in a structured manner.

Description:

The OVPR Quarterly Strategic Investment process provides funding broadly across the institution to strategically maximize research momentum and drive our research enterprise forward by addressing gaps, deficiencies, or opportunities. This funding request process will be utilized to ensure continued research excellence and to accelerate CSU’s ability to successfully pursue new opportunities in an evolving funding landscape. We envision that this mechanism will foster a heightened ability to thrive and pivot by supporting activities that increase capacity, increase collaboration, seed new pathways, and maintain a strong foundation of extramural funding, including for those who have experienced or expect a change in funding and need support to transition to new funding streams. Applications for this mechanism will need to be explicit about why funds are needed, with a clear link to growth or opportunity.

This process is intended to synchronize the submission of requests to the OVPR, establish a common set of funding criteria, provide a means to strategically assess funding needs across a larger pool of proposals, and ensure that investments can be made for identified needs over the remainder of the fiscal year. This program is not intended to sustain individual research projects, replace the start-up/retention funding process, replace funding under the Core/Specialized Facilities RFP, or manage requests for extramural proposal mandatory cost share (see Mandatory Cost Share below).

Of Note

• This fiscal year 2026 (FY26) Quarterly Strategic Investment RFP includes revisions from previous cycles. Please read this call carefully.
• The FY26 “Cycle 2” criteria described herein is for the May 8, 2026 submission deadline only.
• This program may change in subsequent cycles, including potential shifts in eligible requests, prioritized activities, timeline, and funding availability.

Submission Process:

Applications are due by 5:00 pm on the submission deadline date through the CSU InfoReady Review system. The system will not accept applications after 5:00 pm.

See the RFP announcement or the opportunity page within InfoReady Review for information regarding specific required proposal content.

Submission Deadlines:

During FY26, the OVPR Quarterly Strategic Investment process will have two cycles, scheduled to allow for maximum flexibility and agility in responding to identified needs throughout the remainder of the fiscal year. Funding requests will be accepted until the submission deadline (by 5:00 pm MT). Requests received after the deadline will not be considered in that funding cycle and must be submitted to the next funding cycle. New cycles will be announced approximately four weeks prior to the submission deadline.

The submission deadline date for FY26 Cycle 2 is:

Important Documents