Pilot Project Grant

The Pilot Project Grant at Western Washington University aims to initiate innovative research and creative endeavors. With funding up to $5,000, it supports diverse activities such as proof-of-principle projects, planning meetings, and data gathering for new collaborations. Open to all non-student employees, the program encourages exploration beyond traditional research boundaries. However, it does not fund fixed-term activities or ongoing projects. This initiative is designed to foster long-term, impactful scholarly work within the university.

This goal of this program is to help seed projects with potential to open new long-term directions for research, creative expression or scholarship at Western Washington University (WWU). Pilot Project Grants (PPG’s) are intended to enrich and expand WWU’s portfolio of scholarly and creative programs by stimulating the pursuit of opportunities representing new lines of inquiry for the principal investigator (PI), that are of high value to the discipline, and that are expected to have long-lasting impact. The program is designed to allow applicants from all disciplines the opportunity to compete successfully, even if their discipline is not traditionally connected to sponsored research. Thus, PPG’s need not necessarily aim at producing extramural funding, though they may do so.
ACTIVITIES SUPPORTED
PPG awards provide up to $5,000 in support. Funds may be used for supplies, equipment, project-related travel, student salaries, user fees, as well as other expenses necessary for getting significant new ideas off the ground. Examples of the kinds of activities supported by the program include, but are not limited to:
Proof-of-principle activities that would orient the PI’s work in a fundamentally new and promising direction
Planning meetings or site visits for a significant new venture involving outside partners
Gathering preliminary data for an important new interdisciplinary collaboration

Eligibility

The program is open to all non-student employees with formal appointments to the university. This includes staff, research associates, tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty. Recipients may hold only one PPG at a time. Recipients may not have held a PPG in the previous 12-month period. Proposals are accepted from individuals and teams; for team proposals one member serves as the PI and the eligibility criteria are applied only to that individual. Members of the review committee are eligible to apply to the program, but must recuse themselves from the review of their own application

Ineligibility

PPGs are intended to seed sustainable, long-term directions and as such, are not suitable for most fixed-term activities, such as individual performances, productions, tours or investigations.The program does not support already-ongoing activities, routine preliminary studies, or activities that would typically be expected to occur anyway within disciplinary norms without PPG support. Teaching buy-outs or summer salary to provide time for preparing extramural proposals are also not typically supported unless the impacts would be unusually widespread or significant.Conference attendance, symposia, the development of instructional materials, curricula, dissertations, publishing or similar costs, or the acquisition of general-purpose (departmental) equipment are also not supported.