Michigan State University Foundation and MSU announces recipients of 2022 Strategic Partnership Grants
The Michigan State University Foundation and Michigan State University fund programs for Empowering Individuals with Disability in Employment Settings and Mass Timber Scholarship
EAST LANSING, Mich. –– The Michigan State University Foundation and Michigan State University announced today the recipients of the 2022 Strategic Partnership Grant Program (SPG Program).
Funded jointly by the MSU Foundation and Michigan State University, the Strategic Partnership Grants (SPG) Program is an important funding mechanism to support promising new initiatives in key areas of research, scholarship, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Of 22 proposals submitted, two were selected by the review committee through a competitive process.
Recipients for 2022 include:
Dr. Ranjan Mukherjee, Department of Mechanical Engineering and his colleagues for their proposal entitled Empowering Individuals with Disability in Employment Settings: An Ability-First Human-Centric Approach; and
Dr. George H. Berghorn, School of Planning, Design and Construction and his colleagues for their proposal entitled Strengthening Mass Timber Scholarship at Michigan State University
The Strategic Partnership Grant program is an added benefit to our research community at Michigan State,” said vice president for Research and Innovation, Doug Gage, “SPG’s have seeded many important research initiatives at Michigan State which led to significant external funding and centers of excellence across the University
Dr. Mukherjee’s proposal is to form the Ability Innovation Research Lab (AIRL) featuring multidisciplinary expertise and collaborations with an industry partner in Peckham and a rehabilitation network partner in SourceAmerica.
The teams will include members with expertise in vocational rehabilitation, kinesiology, robotics, augmented reality, assistive technologies, and operations and process management. Peckham, as a large community rehabilitation organization, will provide a real-world testing lab for technological solutions and SourceAmerica will assist in scaling the implementation of the developed solutions by identifying and working with other non-profit agencies in their network.
“Our group is excited to develop innovative solutions that achieve greater inclusivity of people with disabilities in the workforce, increasing participation for a historically underrepresented population. ”said Professor Ranjan Mukherjee, the principal investigator for the project.
Dr. Berghorn and his collaborators from the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the College of Engineering, and the Broad College of Business will focus on strengthening Mass Timber Scholarship at Michigan State University. In the past five years, mass timber has grown as a construction material and technique that is displacing conventional steel and reinforced concrete structures in the United States.
Despite its relatively new entry into the domestic construction industry, mass timber is beginning to account for a significant amount of new construction, with nearly 1,200 mass timber building projects constructed or in design as of June 2021. Mass timber construction is expected to account for $2.3 billion of the US construction industry ($1.4 trillion total value) by 2026.
“Growth in the mass timber industry is very exciting due to the promises of reduced construction costs, faster building completion times, and decarbonization of the built environment through carbon storage and avoided emissions benefits,” commented George H. Berghorn, principal investigator for the mass timber project. “We aim to build a center that will build empirical, research driven evidence to support this new field.”
About the Strategic Partnership Grant Program
Funded jointly by the MSU Foundation and MSU colleges, the Strategic Partnership Grants (SPG) Program is an important funding mechanism to support promising new initiatives in key areas of research, scholarship, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Successful SPG concepts aim to achieve several of the following aspirations:
Create a nexus of national/international research preeminence that will raise the stature of the university, significantly differentiating MSU from its peers.
Promote productive and sustained research collaboration and productivity among faculty that, without this funding, would otherwise not occur.
Promote work that is high risk, high return, with a potential for high reputational benefit.
Position MSU faculty to compete successfully for significant external funding by creating a path to sustainability of the research endeavor; builds a bridge to a future, not a project that ends at the end of the SPG funding.
Promote the development of research ideas with significant (long term) commercial potential and/or broad community or global impact.
“The Strategic Partnership Grant Program has been catalytic in helping launch multi-disciplinary research initiatives that might not normally be funded through traditional channels” said David Washburn, Executive Director of the Michigan State University Foundation. “Watching many of these initiatives grow after this funding has been very exciting and we’re looking forward to seeing these two new projects develop over time.”
Since 2002, the Michigan State University Foundation has provided over $30M in funding for over 65 SPG projects that have been able to able to raise in excess of $100M in outside funding from state and federal funding sources.
Examples include seed funding for the Center for Integrated Study of Vision and Language, Center for Statistical Training & Consulting, Center for Systems Biology, Center for Materials in Nanotechnology, Center for Structural Fire Engineering, Accelerator Technology Modeling Center, the Institute for Quantum Sciences and Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution, and Macrosystems to name a few.
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About the Michigan State University Foundation
The Michigan State University Foundation is a non-profit research foundation focused on the mission of helping Michigan State University achieve its objectives around economic development through the commercialization of intellectual property created by its faculty, staff, and students. The MSU Foundation manages an endowment built from decades of licensing revenue. In addition to providing over $10 million in research funding to MSU annually, the MSU Foundation operates three wholly owned subsidiary organizations – Spartan Innovations, Red Cedar Ventures, Michigan Rise Pre-Seed III Fund - focused on technology commercialization, new venture creation and economic development.