President’s Initiative

Iowa State’s Office of the President has made unprecedented investments in research efforts that will lead to major advances, discoveries, and technologies.

Since the Presidential Interdisciplinary Research Initiative (PIRI) began in 2012, it has launched a dozen new interdisciplinary research teams made up of more than 100 Iowa State researchers from a wide range of disciplines. The teams have already leveraged their PIRI support to attract more than $40 million in external research funding.

The first round of Presidential Interdisciplinary Research Seed (PIRS) grants was announced in 2017. PIRS grants support the beginning stages of new interdisciplinary research that has strong potential to attract external funding.

Projects that received the initial PIRS grants will take on an array of challenges, from crop diseases to human health to the resiliency of spacecraft materials.

In 2017, the first round of Presidential Cost-Sharing Research Instrumentation Funding (COSRIF) was also announced. COSRIF is building Iowa State’s research infrastructure by offering support for new research instruments, expanding the capabilities of existing equipment, and developing new instrumentation.

In the first projects to receive funding, new equipment will help researchers scale their work to the nano level.