Seed Funding and Incentive Grants

The Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy awards seed funding and incentive grants to faculty affiliated with the Center. Faculty who receive either seed funding or an incentive grant are expected to submit their proposal through CPIP. 

 

Application Process

Seed Funding

CPIP offers its faculty affiliates grants to aid in the development of proposals for external funding. Expectations are that the seed grant will position the faculty affiliate(s) to submit competitive proposals requesting $100,000 or more in extramural funding to support research at UCI and that the extramural proposal will be submitted through CPIP. The typical amount for seed funding is between $5,000 and $7,500.  

To request seed funding, submit the following to the co-directors:

• Brief description of the project.
• Budget and budget justification for the amount requested in seed funding. CPIP's allocation to your project will be based on need and the budget you provide.
• Details about the extramural funding sponsor(s) you are targeting and an explanation about the need for seed funding from CPIP to develop a competitive grant for submission to external funders. The details about the sponsor should include the sponsor’s name, the funding program's name, allowable budget, deadlines, links to information online, and other relevant information. 

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Contact the co-directors with questions or to submit your seed funding proposal. 

 

Incentive Grants

CPIP is offering incentive grants of up to $15,000 to CPIP faculty affiliate teams pursuing multidisciplinary research. Projects should address a topic broadly relevant to population, inequality, and/or policy, include faculty from two or more schools, and aim to develop one or more research proposals for submission to an external sponsor totaling at least $200,000. Faculty are expected to submit their extramural proposals through CPIP. We are particularly interested in receiving applications for new collaborations. For full consideration, teams should submit proposals as described here. 

 

Grant Recipients

 

2025

Olga Malkova (Economics) received funding that will allow her to access data for a project titled “Effects of Gorbachev’s Anti-Alcohol Campaign on Health, Economic Outcomes and Family Well-Being in Estonia.” ($5,700).

Bhash Mazumder (Economics) received funding to support a graduate student researcher during the summer for a project on “The Impact of Vehicles on Air Pollution and Health” ($7,500).

Emily Penner (Education) received a seed grant to support a graduate student researcher during the summer for a project on “Examining Ethnic Studies as it Scales across California” ($7,545).

Jeffrey Swindle (Criminology, Law and Society) received seed funding to conduct interviews and surveys for a project titled “Migration Dreams, Plans, and Realities during a New Era of Transnational Authoritarianism” ($8,000).

 

2024

Denise Payán (Public Health) received a seed grant to support a graduate student researcher to assist with completing data analyses for a current project and drafting specific sections of a competitive NIH R01 grant proposal ($7,940).

Jack Liebersohn and Tejaswi Velayudhan (Economics) received seed funding to establish preliminary findings with the help of a graduate research assistant who will be funded during summer 2024 to collect preliminary data and run the preliminary analysis on a project titled “Housing as a Savings Commitment: Evidence From California's Proposition 13” ($8,000).

Jade Jenkins (Education) received a seed grant to support a graduate student researcher who will clean, harmonize, and assemble an analyzable dataset derived from Long Beach Unified School District’s various data systems for a project titled “Unpacking Inequities Across California’s Preschool Programs During Scale-up” ($6,000).

Stephen Schueller (Psychological Science and Informatics) received a seed grant to support incentives, devices, and shipping costs for 30 participants in a pilot study on wearables and risk sensitivity for a project  titled “Leveraging Data Science to Explore Ecological Valid Approach to Studying Reward Seeking Behaviors in Opioid Use Disorder" ($8,130).

Xin Xie (Language Science) received a seed grant to pay participants to complete studies that will assess the viability, reliability, and data quality of a web-based approach to engage a broader, traditionally underserved older adult demographic for a project titled “Large-scale testing of speech recognition in older adults” ($5,100).

Alana LeBron and Jun Wu (Public Health) received a seed grant to support a graduate student contributing to a mixed-methods pilot study examining health care provider practices in communicating and testing children for lead exposures, clinical intervention, and collaboration with public health and community-based resources ($10,000).

George Tita and Naomi Sugie (Criminology, Law & Society) and Matthew Freedman (Economics) received seed funding to support a graduate student to contribute to a project titled, “Rental and Cash Assistance to Help Prevent Homelessness and Improve Public Safety” ($9,869).

Carolina Valdivia (Criminology, Law & Society) has been awarded a seed grant to support one graduate and two undergraduate students to better understand and address the basic needs of immigrant college students across the country through a qualitative research study among those from undocumented and mixed-status families who are currently enrolled in postsecondary institutions in the United States ($9,926).

Matthew Freedman (Economics) and Emily Owens (Criminology, Law & Society) received seed funding to support two graduate students over summer 2024 at 50% time and for 1.5 months. Their project involving the Los Angeles County Office of the Public Defender, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and the Superior Court of Los Angeles County is titled Expanding Access to Publicly Provided Defense ($9,431.76).

Charis Kubrin (Criminology, Law, and Society) received seed funding to support a graduate student for a project on Rap Lyrics and Juror Decision-Making in Criminal Cases: Autobiographical Confessions of Illegal Behavior or Artistic Expression? ($8,109). 

David Schaefer (Sociology) received seed funding for a graduate student researcher who is supporting a project investigating questions related to how durations of spells of incarceration in jail are distributed ($5,000).

Kelley Fong (Sociology) received seed funding to pilot a short online survey with educators about the “school-to-Child Protective Services” pathway that will examine perspectives and experiences with CPS reporting ($5,000).

 

2023

Asia Bento (Sociology) and Vellore Arthi (Economics) received an incentive grant to support a graduate student researcher for their project Investigating Outcomes from Cosigning Relationships: Examining the Influence of Strong Social Ties and Socioeconomic Status Characteristics ($15,000).

David Neumark (Economics) and Tim Bruckner (Public Health) received an incentive grant for their project titled Inequality in Job Opportunities and Black-White Differences in Cognitive Impairment and Dementia that positioned them to submit a research grant to NIH ($15,000).

Brittany Morey (Public Health) received funds to support a graduate student researcher for a project titled Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Environmental Health Disparities ($5,000).

Kristin Turney (Sociology) received funds to support two graduate student researchers to collect and analyze intensive longitudinal data on the time-varying relational, instrumental, and health consequences of jail incarceration for family members, including parents, siblings, romantic partners, and adult children ($8,161). 

 

2022

Suellen Hopfer (Public Health) received funds for a two-pronged pilot study in preparation for an NIH grant proposal on vaccine misinformation. Some of this seed funding will support a graduate student researcher for two summer months ($10,000).

 

2021

Damon Clark, Rachel Baker, Di Xu (Education) received funds for their project focused on community colleges as part of an IES/NSF proposal ($15,000).

Annie Ro (Public Health) received funds for the "pre-study section mock review" in which faculty read and provided feedback on specific aims of her NIH proposal ($1,000).

Naomi Sugie (Criminology, Law & Society) received funds to support research for a project titled, "From Rights to Votes: An Experimental Study of Text Messaging Outreach to Individuals with Criminal Convictions in the 2020 Election” ($5,000).

Bryan Sykes (Criminology, Law & Society) received funds for his project, Empirical and Epistemological Inquiries into Mixed-Methods Research, as part of an NSF proposal ($5,000).

Bryan Sykes (Criminology, Law & Society) and George Farkas (Education) received funds for a graduate student researcher to clean and link two administrative data sets ($4,355).

Kristin Turney (Sociology) received funds to support data collection about pandemic-related mortality in prisons across all 50 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons ($5,000).  

 

2020

Vellore Arthi (Economics) received funds for a graduate student researcher to work on long-term labor market scarring from recessions as part of an NSF proposal ($5,000).

Tim Bruckner (Public Health) received funds for analyzing the universe of live births, infant deaths, and fetal deaths among NH blacks and NH whites in the US (~65 million records, 1995 to 2018) ($5,000).

Damon Clark, Rachel Baker, and Di Xu (Education) received funds for a graduate student researcher to assist with a proposal related to  earning college degrees and getting college degrees ($5,000).

George Farkas (Education),  Emily Owens and Bryan Sykes (Criminology, Law & Society) received funds for analyzing the disproportionate tendency of students from low income and African American or Latino backgrounds to be incarcerated at relatively young ages, known as The School-to-Prison Pipeline ($5,000).

David Neumark (Economics) received funds for a graduate student researcher to work on machine learning methods to predict work at older ages as part of an NIA proposal ($5,000).

Daniel Parker (Public Health) received travel and research funds to extract primary source health and migration data in East Africa ($4,400).

Annie Ro (Public Health) received funds for a graduate student researcher to clean and analyze health care data on undocumented immigrants in LA county ($5,000).