Harvard Data Science Initiative Competitive Research Fund
Deadline: February 10, 2020 by 4:00PM
Award Amount: $5,000-$100,000 for one year (the Fund will support two awards of up to $100,000 each, and two to four smaller awards of up to $50,000 each. A total of $250,000 of funding is available).
Eligible Applicants: Individuals who hold a faculty appointment at a Harvard school and who have principal investigator rights at that school

The 2020 DSI Competitive Research Fund will support planning grants that coalesce and accelerate methodologically-focused research. For applied work, the DSI is especially interested in projects that intersect with or are likely to have impact within or across the DSI’s research themes:

1. Data-Driven Scientific Discovery (includes discovery of new materials, drug and gene discovery, environment, astronomy, neuroscience)
2. Markets and Networks (includes networks and influence, innovation and crowds, digital economy, jobs, data-driven decisions, blockchain)
3. Personalized Health (includes precision medicine, precision public health, medical informatics, diagnostics, personal devices)
4. Evidence-Based Policy (includes equality of opportunity, healthcare economics, democracy and governance, climate change -- resilience and mitigation)

Work that is primarily methodological is also strongly encouraged. The DSI is interested in promoting advances across many areas that relate to the science of data, including causal inference, visualization, scalable and robust inference, experimental design, interpretability and robustness, ethics (including privacy and fairness), control of false discovery, human-in-the-loop systems, reinforcement learning, adaptive data systems, deep learning, streaming algorithms, theoretical foundations, reproducibility, and data sharing. Proposed projects should suggest the possibility of longer-term research programs and should describe creative and innovative approaches to advancing research over one to two years.