100 A&M Projects Receive Seed Funding From T3 Round Three

Texas A&M Triads for Transformation (T3) has closed its third round, delivering $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 investigations or improvements in a wide range of areas, including neuroscience, gene therapy, workforce technology, childhood immunization, macroeconomics, artificial intelligence, nutrition, precision agriculture, nanomaterials, social networks, reading disabilities and more.

A complete list of funded Round Three projects is available at the T3 website.

“Our T3 program is designed to encourage our outstanding faculty to identify global problems and to generate novel solutions by crossing over traditional academic boundaries and engaging in groundbreaking research,” Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said. “This process inspires surprising collaborations while forging dynamic relationships across disciplines among our faculty members and their research teams.”

Round Three of the T3 program began in September 2019 and closed in early December 2019.

Of the 300 faculty members funded in T3’s Round Three, 103 are assistant professors. By comparison, Round Two in 2018 funded 107 assistant professors and Round One in 2017 funded 97 assistant professors.

Funded Triads for all three rounds included faculty members from 16 A&M colleges and schools, University Libraries and the branch campuses in Galveston and Qatar.

T3, an initiative of the 10-year, $100 million President’s Excellence Fund, invests $3 million each year in 100 faculty-led projects at $30,000 each. 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.