CITRIS Provides Help to Faculty in Creating New Centers and Interfacing with Industry

Creating New Research Centers

The CITRIS mission is to foster research and innovation in Information Technology to enable solutions to the most challenging societal problems affecting the quality of life, for Californians and the world. Our approach is to incubate new research centers that house projects under a central theme or technology. Under our Seed Funding program, researchers from CITRIS-affiliated campuses may apply for funding and support to help start a new center. New centers proposed under this program are evaluated based on the merits of the research proposal and the degree to which they embrace cross-campus and multi-disciplinary collaborations.

Although not exclusive to these topics, our current, major thrusts center on six themes:

Corporate Support

As part of new center creation, as well as in support of on-going research in CITRIS-affiliated centers, we work with new and established corporate partners and governmental entities that wish to collaborate on research projects. We can help “shop” a research proposal among prospective industrial supporters, helping to raise the profile of research projects, and hopefully secure additional funding for those projects. Although industrial sponsorship for research comes to the University through many paths, CITRIS provides a very large “front door” for our Corporate Partners through which they direct financial support to fund research that they to fund. We do not interfere with other paths to industrial support that faculty may seek.

Often a sponsor or a potential sponsor will look through our website, focus on a specific theme, and ask for details on a few projects and centers. We also ask the Chief Scientists of each CITRIS campus to provide us with details on the requested research area and contact information of PIs working on the projects of interest. We publish full-color brochures for each research thrust detailing with current projects and research proposals. The brochures are updated frequently, to keep up-to-date with the constantly changing research.

CITRIS hosts dozens of corporate and governmental agencies (local, nation and international) that visit each year. We arrange meetings and presentations for the visiting sponsors or potential sponsors. Depending on time and circumstance, we try to have faculty present their work to the visitors. Normally, we also host one annual research symposium in Europe and one in Asia to promote CITRIS-related research and procure international funding. We also conduct on-site briefings for our Founding and Platinum Members to update them on the success of the projects they are funding and pitch them new ideas.

For a list of our partners, please see the following site:
http://www.citris-uc.org/partners/corporate.

In both of these regards, the CITRIS staff is available to help faculty in whatever ways it can to secure funding and partnerships. More information may be obtained through direct contact with either Travis Richardson at 510.643-4864 (travisr AT citris-uc.org) or Gary Baldwin at 510.643-8489 (garyb AT citris-uc.org).

The following presentation can provide more details on CITRIS research centers and funding:

CITRIS Research Centers and Funding (2MB pdf Presentation)