UMD Faculty Fellows

The CoRPI Fellows Program

The UMass Dartmouth Community Research and Partnership Initiative will sponsor up to three Fellows per year who are actively working on community engaged research projects. CoRPI provides support for Fellows to develop fundable research projects and seek outside grants to further their research agendas.

What Do CoRPI Fellowship Grants Support?

Community Research and Partnership Initiative Grants are intended to support projects that aim to solve community-based problems through comprehensive qualitative and/or quantitative data collection, rigorous analysis, and effective research design. Community Research and Partnership Grants are not intended to support the development of courses or curriculum, or support service learning courses.

Successful applications will propose to create knowledge that informs both academic and community decision making. The proposed research program should be relevant to the applicants’ field(s) of study. CoRPI particularly welcomes novel research initiatives as well as projects that are team-based, collaborative, and/or cross-disciplinary.

Funding and Support for Fellows

CoRPI offers support for research projects at various stages of development. Exploratory projects seek to develop an idea or get a program off the ground. CoRPI can help the move toward funding for a project that has not been implemented before. Developing projects might have an existing research program that is not community-focused, or might be conceptually community focused but lacks partnerships. For these types of projects, CoRPI will help to make matches with community members, establish new partnerships, find new sources of funding, or add a community-engaged component to an existing research project. CoRPI can also help Established researchers move an existing community-engaged research project to the next level and secure major grants from national and international funders.

CoRPI Fellows will receive:

  • One course release ($6,000)
  • Grant writing assistance including targeted grant submission, peer review, writing, and editing help
  • Project development support
  • $2000 stipend to put toward faculty mentoring program

Expectations and Deliverables
The expectation of CoRPI Fellows is that they work to develop and submit grant proposals to outside funding agencies. The expectations of a CoRPI Fellow are as follows:

  • Fellows will provide monthly updates to the Director and Associate Director of CoRPI and Associate Provost for Academic Research on progress toward completion.
  • Fellows will identify and work with an external mentor.
  • Fellows within one year of their appointment will submit at minimum two significant external grant applications to fund their research agenda.
  • Fellows will share their work-in-progress with colleagues and community partners in an oral presentation as part of an annual breakfast symposium hosted by CoRPI, the Leduc Center, and the Office of the Vice Provost.
  • Fellows will submit a report to be included in CoRPI’s annual report that will summarize progress in achieving the aims of the research project, including scholarly publications, grants, or reports (including links or electronic copies when applicable) 6. Fellows will agree to support future fellows by contributing a portion of F&A indirect return to CoRPI.