DETERMINING AND DISTRIBUTING FUNDS TO SUPPORT UW-MADISON
WARF’s board of trustees approves an annual grant to the university to support the following fiscal year (July through June). They guide the mission and objectives of grants; approve the budget for grant making; and maintain open communications with campus leaders. On campus, distribution of WARF’s annual grant is primarily administered by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR). Every year, OVCR reports the impact of grants on campus to ensure the overall funding direction remains consistent with WARF’s mission.
Key Funding Areas
Administration
These awards fund compensation, benefits and general expenses of the OVCR administration team that manages research programming.
Campus Programming
Programs supported by WARF include Discovery to Product (D2P), the Law & Business Clinics and programming in the Discovery Building.
Department Share Royalty Funds and Grant Distributions
WARF shares 15 percent of net revenue with the campus department (or similar organizational unit defined by the university) based on the location and affiliation of the inventors whose intellectual property is licensed to a commercial entity. The distribution occurs once a year in the fall. The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) is responsible for allocating and crediting the appropriate university accounts and sends a letter to the appropriate chair (or other administrator) informing them of this credit.
Endowment for Excellence
The Endowment for Excellence program was launched to recruit related interdisciplinary clusters of faculty. These funds are earmarked for faculty compensation and involve a commitment by WARF, UW Foundation and the state of Wisconsin.
Faculty Fellowships
This program provides flexible research awards:
- $100,000 per award for WARF Named Professorships to recognize distinguished research contributions.
- $75,000 per award for Kellett Mid-Career Awards to recognize and support mid-career faculty from seven to 20 years after their promotion to a tenured position.
- $60,000 per award for H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowships to recognize and support junior faculty up to six years after their promotion to a tenured position.
Faculty Recruitment and Retention
These funds are meant to entice new faculty or retain existing faculty. This could be through salary packages, equipment purchases or funding flexible research.
Requests for these funds come in from all schools and colleges at UW-Madison; then packages are negotiated by the four divisional faculty associate vice chancellors.
Fall Research Competition
Faculty and staff are invited to submit research proposals to the annual fall research competition. This grant supports new areas of research; provides leverage for extramural proposals; assists junior faculty; or supports multidisciplinary research. The competition provides funding for cutting-edge research carried out by more than 400 faculty from departments throughout the university.
Graduate Student Support
These awards support graduate student education, mostly in tuition and living expense stipends. To ensure competitive distribution among physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences and other areas, such as underrepresented minority graduate students, disbursement decisions come from as many as 13 different faculty committees.
Matching Grants
There are more than 2,000 active awards on campus using some type of matching funds according to OVCR. Extramural funding matches are often mandatory for research grant opportunities, and WARF funds are leveraged for securing additional support for the university. Matching opportunities have included the Major Research Instrumentation program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NSF’s Integrative Graduate Education & Research Traineeship program, NSF fellowships, trainee programs of the National Institutes of Health and Title VI awards.
Strategic Initiatives
Building on the success of the UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative, OVCR launched the next generation of research funding called the Research Forward initiative, which seeks to support collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-investigator research projects that are high-risk, high-impact and transformative.