When they were established by Research Corporation in 1971, the goal of the Cottrell College Science Awards was to “reassert the importance of basic research as a vital component of academic science in the private, predominantly undergraduate colleges.”
The Multi-Investigator Cottrell College Science Award (MI-CCSA) program was a new initiative aimed at helping start sustainable, collaborative programs of research by cross-disciplinary teams of faculty from science departments in primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). The program focused on early career faculty with a proposed research project that could not be effectively attacked by an individual researcher or a group of researchers within the same discipline. It was aimed at projects that, by their complexity and interdisciplinary nature, require a cross-disciplinary team approach to achieve significant progress and sustainability.
The program, which began in 2009, was a three-year pilot project in order to determine its potential to facilitate cooperation across disciplinary boundaries in PUIs, build sustainable programs of cross-disciplinary research and facilitate an academic culture for teaching and research in the sciences that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.
The objectives for the program included: Funding projects that will advance highly significant research projects that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, produce peer-reviewed publications and subsequently attract competitive funding for continuation; Funding projects that will build teams of students and faculty that cross traditional department boundaries; Helping early career faculty establish long-term, sustainable and productive research programs; Advancing undergraduates to careers in science; and Facilitating the development of an academic culture that supports and encourages cross-disciplinary and collaborative research and teaching.