T3 Round Two Provides $3 Million For 100 Projects

The second round of T3: Texas A&M Triads for Transformation has closed, providing $3 million in seed funding for 100 innovative and interdisciplinary research projects, each led by a three-member team of Texas A&M University faculty-researchers, the Division of Research announced today.

Funded projects include research investigating or improving renewable energy, biodiversity, evacuation planning, virtual reality, suicide prevention, space habitats, climate modeling, cyber security, autonomous vehicles, ethics in the laboratory, energy storage and market efficiency.

A complete list of funded Round Two projects is available online at t3.tamu.edu.

Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said, “The T3 program stimulates our faculty to think beyond disciplinary boundaries and to tackle projects that require a wide range of knowledge and expertise. The process of posting ideas and forming Triads has already nucleated new collaborations that reach across the boundaries of colleges and schools, attracting unexpected collaborators and forging dynamic relationships among them.”

Round Two of the T3 program began in September 2018, and closed in early December 2018.

Of the 300 faculty members funded in T3’s Round Two, 107 are assistant professors. In addition, 83 funded projects received graduate tuition supplements while 82 received undergraduate salary supplements. By comparison, Round One in the fall of 2017 funded 97 assistant professors while providing tuition supplements for 81 graduate students and salary supplements for 75 undergraduates.

Funded Triads in both Rounds One and Two included faculty members from each of Texas A&M’s 16 colleges and schools, University Libraries and the branch campuses in Galveston and Qatar.

T3, an initiative of the ten-year, $100 million President’s Excellence Fund, invests $3 million each year in 100 faculty-led projects at $30,000 each.  Additional funds are available to support undergraduate and graduate student researchers. Funded projects are designed for completion within 12 to 24 months.

Each year, the T3 program invites all of Texas A&M’s tenured or tenure-track faculty to submit project ideas, which are posted online for all eligible A&M faculty members to review. To qualify for funding, a project leader must attract two other faculty-researchers to form a Triad, which must include members from at least two different A&M colleges or schools. A semi-random process then selects 100 projects for funding from the pool of qualified Triads; this process is weighted toward Triads that include at least one assistant professor.

About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represented annual expenditures of more than $905.4 million in fiscal year 2017, ranking Texas A&M in the top 20 of the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development survey (2017). Texas A&M’s research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting, in many cases, in economic benefits to the state, nation and world. To learn more, visit http://research.tamu.edu.