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COVID-19 Recovery Grants help faculty focus on research and creative work

A conceptual image of molecules.

As the world adapts to the long-term nature of COVID-19, the effects of the pandemic continue to reverberate for Northwestern’s faculty.

Faculty faced closures of labs, archives and theaters; travel cancellations; publishing interruptions; and spent additional time teaching and caregiving. To help address these personal and professional challenges, the University established a suite of resources, grants and programs to help those who suffered the greatest negative impact. In 2022, Northwestern awarded nearly $2 million in funding to over 50 faculty members as part of its recovery outreach. The new COVID-19 Research Recovery Grants and expanded Provost Grants for Research in Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts (HSSA) proved so popular and impactful that they were extended for 2023.

Among the many applications of grant awards, faculty whose research or creative work was markedly delayed, interrupted or otherwise disrupted used last year’s funding to support graduate students and postdocs in their labs; hire videographers, animators and other crew for films; and travel to archives.

“Northwestern’s COVID-19 Recovery Grant has been essential to my post-pandemic creative research,” Assistant Professor of Theatre Andrew Boyce said. “By helping me re-establish a professional, working design studio, the grant has helped me to lay a foundation for the work and career I will continue to build for years to come, along with creating a collaborative space committed to nurturing our community of Northwestern students, colleagues and alumni working in the performing arts.”

Associate Professor of Psychology Onnie Rogers used her grant funds to support her research-community partnership with Distinctively Me, a non-profit in Chicago, and to implement the Teen TEE (Talk, Education, Experience) program for socioemotional development with middle-school Black girls in Chicagoland.

“The COVID-19 Recovery Grant has made a meaningful impact on my research,” Rogers said. “I was able to hire an excellent research coordinator to support the intellectual and administrative tasks to run the multiple active projects in our lab. The funding not only covered research expenses but also created the space and opportunity to move forward with my writing, mentoring and research.”

More than two-thirds of the 2022 grant recipients were caregivers during the pandemic, including faculty with childcare and eldercare responsibilities. Others experienced delays as they dealt with the closure of labs and space on campus, as well as local schools.

“The resources made available to me through the Research Recovery Grant have been critical for helping me to jump-start data analysis on my second major research project that screeched to a halt in the pandemic,” Assistant Professor of Political Science Kim Marion Suiseeya said. “I have been able to hire a graduate student and an undergraduate student to prepare the data, run initial analyses and provide support in conducting more complex analyses. These efforts have helped me regain momentum, and I am really excited to be able to fully engage in this project again.”

This year, COVID-19 Research Recovery Grants are open to tenured associate professors (up to $25,000) and pre-tenure assistant professors (up to $35,000) in select schools who did not receive a grant in the last round.

Additionally, Northwestern has established a new flexible Career Development and Writing Support Grant through which faculty can apply for funding of up to $5,000 toward the career development program, writing support program or other academic service of their choice that best supports their own research or creative work recovery. Examples could include travel to academic conferences or to meetings with grant program officers or scholarly/creative collaborators; developmental editing, professional copy editing or indexing; or academic coaching for a specific goal. The deadline to apply for the Career Development and Writing Support Grant is March 1, 2023.