100 Texas A&M Projects Receive $3 Million From President’s Excellence Fund

Texas A&M Triads for Transformation (T3) has closed its fourth round, 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 members, the Division of Research announced today.

Funded projects include investigations or improvements in a wide range of areas, including automobile technology, COVID-19 and cancer research, virtual simulation, artificial intelligence, emission reduction, neuroscience, biodiversity, social networks, space exploration and more.

A complete list of funded Round 4 projects is available at the T3 website.

“The T3 program inspires innovative collaboration among Texas A&M’s exceptional faculty members by creating new pathways between academic colleges and schools,” said Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau. “This process forges new and dynamic relationships between research teams that lead to innovative approaches and solutions to globally challenging problems.”

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.

Round 4 of the T3 program began in October 2020, and closed in mid-December 2020.

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 Texas A&M faculty members to review. To qualify for funding, a project leader must attract two other faculty members to form a Triad, which must include members from at least two different Texas 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. Of the 300 faculty members funded in T3’s Round 4, 109 are assistant professors, 92 associate professors and 99 professors.

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

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 in science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M generated annual expenditures of more than $952 million in fiscal year 2019. Texas A&M ranked in the top 20 of the most recent National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development survey based on expenditures of more than $922 million in fiscal year 2018. 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. research.tamu.edu