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Royalty Research Fund

Sidebar / More Information

Through the RRF, the Office of Research supports UW faculty seeking to establish new research programs. See below for information regarding the RRF and how to apply.

Purpose

The purpose of the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) is to advance new directions in research, particularly:

  1. in disciplines for which external funding opportunities are minimal,
  2. for faculty who are junior in rank, and/or
  3. in cases where funding may provide unique opportunities to increase applicants’ competitiveness for subsequent funding.

Proposals must demonstrate a high probability of generating important new scholarly materials or resources, significant data or information, or essential instrumentation resources that are likely to lead to external funding or that might lead to a new technology. (Note: RRF proposals must support faculty development; this fund is not intended to support graduate student and/or post-doctoral research projects.)

History

This program is funded from royalty and licensing fee income generated by the University's technology transfer program. The RRF has been offered twice a year since the Spring of 1992. In 1994, the Royalty Research Fund Scholar program was initiated to provide one quarter of release time for faculty with full teaching loads to engage in concentrated scholarly activities. The RRF welcomes proposals with budgets up to $40,000.

Eligibility

Faculty and professional staff with PI status (as determined by their dean) are eligible to apply; those with acting or affiliate appointments may not apply. Eligible faculty ranks include: Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, Research Professor, Research Associate Professor, and Research Assistant Professor. A co-PI must also hold one of the eligible ranks. If you have already received an RRF award, you are not eligible to apply again for a period of two years after the previous RRF award was formally terminated and the final report received. RRF Scholar applicants (those requesting one quarter of release time from teaching) must normally teach at least four regular and substantial courses per year; independent study and dissertation supervision are not included.

Applications Allowed

An applicant may submit only one proposal per round. A co-PI may apply for more than one proposal, but the committee will fund only one of them. Our policy precludes PIs and co-PIs from having multiple funded proposals within the same period. There are no restrictions on participating faculty who are not PIs. A proposal which is not funded may be resubmitted only if substantially revised or if requested by the review committee; any proposal can be submitted a maximum of three times. Copies of previously funded proposals for the past five years are available for examination (by appointment) in the Office of Research, G98 Gerberding Hall.

Matching Funds, External Support and Start-Up Funds

The RRF may not be proposed as matching funds for another grant. An RRF grant may be used as matching for a proposal submitted after the RRF award date. Applications can be made for external support of the same project, but an RRF award will not be given if an external award has been made. Support will not be provided merely to supplement or extend an ongoing funded research project. The RRF is not intended to provide or supplement start-up funds for new faculty.

When to Apply / Deadline

Proposals are solicited twice a year and are due by 5:00 pm the last Monday in September and the first Monday in March; awards are announced by January 15 and June 15, respectively.

Departments receive an email of the RRF application materials with updated program information a couple months in advance of the deadline.

Fall Round
Spring Round

Approximately one week after the due date, the Office of Research sends each applicant a proposal confirmation to be reviewed for accuracy; if this doesn’t arrive, it indicates that the proposal wasn’t successfully submitted.

Review

Proposals are reviewed by a faculty committee that recommends funding priorities to the Office of Research. The committee solicits reviews from two faculty peers based on written proposal evaluation criteria. Please note that these reviewers will not necessarily be specialists in the applicant’s subfield. Thought should be given, therefore, to crafting the proposal so that a wider audience may understand it. Although technical field-specific information will be expected, the major features of the proposal should also be accessible to non-specialists. The primary criterion is the merit of the proposal. Secondary criteria include suitability to the goals of the RRF and available opportunities and timeliness of the proposal for obtaining subsequent funding. In disciplines for which applicants may also be eligible to compete for federal funding (e.g., NIH, NSF), preference is given to junior faculty. Similarly, among proposals of comparable merit, preference is given to junior faculty. Proposals from senior faculty are funded only when they support a genuinely new direction in the applicant’s research and/or career development.

Budgets

Proposals will be funded within a range of up to $40,000. Only proposals identified by the review committee as exceptional will be awarded funding at the upper end of the funding range. The review committee can recommend a reduction in the proposed budget to allow support of as many meritorious projects as possible. Funds will not be released until after the awards are announced and the requisite paperwork is completed and approved. These are one-year awards.

Patents and Copyrights

The University of Washington owns any patents, trademarks, copyrights or other work with commercial value from discoveries and inventions resulting from work funded by the Royalty Research Fund and these will be administered in accordance with the University's Patent, Invention, and Copyright policy. All such work shall be disclosed promptly to the University's Office of Technology Transfer.

How to Apply

There are two distinct RRF opportunities: the standard RRF Program & the RRF Scholars Program. Application materials are the same for both the standard RRF Program & the RRF Scholars Program.

Before applying, be sure to review the information listed above regarding the RRF Program AND the Instructions for Preparing RRF Proposals. All application materials should be submitted to the Office of Research, not the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP).

RRF Application Form

RRF-1 Form - The only standard form used for RRF applications. Please complete and submit the appropriate version RRF-1 form and application materials to the Office of Research. A separate RRF-1 form must be submitted for the PI, and for each co-PI.

If your proposal has one PI, simply use the first link, RRF-1 Form PI version. If your proposal also has one co-PI, the co-PI should use the co-PI #1 version. If your proposal has two co-PIs, then co-PI version #1 and co-PI version #2 will need to be used, etc. It is very important that each individual fills out a separate and unique version of the RRF-1 form. If two individuals use the same version, the form values will not combine properly (one will overwrite the other), when the pdf files are combined for submission.

  1. RRF-1 Form [PI Version] (pdf)
  2. RRF-1 Form [co-PI #1 Version] (pdf)
  3. RRF-1 Form [co-PI #2 Version] (pdf)
  4. RRF-1 Form [co-PI #3 Version] (pdf)

NOTE: The RRF form is an interactive (fillable) PDF file, so it may be completed on-line and printed out as long as Acrobat Reader 5.0 (free) or better is installed. Saving changes to the form requires the full version (not free) of Acrobat software 5.0 or better.

Questions