Rockefeller College Research Incentive Fund

A small portion of the indirect costs associated with external grants is returned to Rockefeller College for use in supporting and encouraging funded research projects. This money is pooled as the Rockefeller College Research Incentive Fund (RCRIF). Applications are considered on a rolling basis; please submit requests a minimum of two weeks before funds are needed, but bear in mind that funds may run out as the academic year wears on.

Only tenured or tenure track faculty are eligible to apply. Faculty who already have research accounts must spend those down before requesting RCRIF funds. Faculty must document a good-faith effort to secure other sources of funds (e.g., having applied for a FRAP A/B award or external grants.) Requests from junior faculty take priority. RCRIF funds cannot be used to support attendance at professional-association meetings absent a clear link to a specific project in development; even then, such requests will take lower priority than those for research purposes. Requests for seed funding to make a project more likely to secure an external grant (particularly competitive and/or substantial grants), or likely to result in a high-impact publication or other research output, will take priority.

The maximum award under the RCRIF is $2,000. Recent awards have ranged from $500 dollars to $1,800. A committee consisting of the department chairs, the dean, and the director of the Center for Policy Research oversees the allocation of these funds, with a portion of the funds at the discretion of each department.

Faculty wishing to apply for RCRIF funding should submit the information below to the dean, the director of the Center for Policy Research (Victor Asal), and their department chair (Edmund Stazyk or Meredith Weiss).

An application form can be found here: RCRIF Application Form.

In order to maintain an open, fair, and transparent process, information about awards, including amount, recipient, and purpose, will be posted on the Center for Policy Research web site. Fund recipients will be required to provide a brief report on how the money was used and its impact on research at Rockefeller College.

Summary of Recent Awards

Date of award	Recipient	Amount	Purpose	Report
Feb-16	Jennifer Dodge	$465	Fracking in New York: Strategic Communication and the Creation of a Policy Controversy - Incremental Funding
			This award provided a necessary increase in student funding level discovered after application for and receipt of a FRAP Award from the Vice President for Research's Office.
Oct-15	David Matkin	$2,500	Matching support towards the purchase of a one year license for a Bloomberg terminal to be used by Public Administration faculty and students for data mining.
Apr-15	Johannes Karreth	$1,800	Funding for travel to Cape Town, South Africa for research on how international governmental organizations can mitigate potential violent conflicts between countries.	REPORT
Mar-15	David Matkin	$1,000	Access to The National Center for Charitable Statistics, the clearinghouse for data on the nonprofit sector in the United States	REPORT
			This data will allow us to expand our work to where it will enhance a research proposal to be submitted to the Steven H. Sandell Grant Program.
Dec-14	Zsofia Barta	$1,500	Research Proposal: American Public Finances Caught Up In A War of Attrition	REPORT
			Fund was used to enlist the help of a research assistant with research needed to put together a detailed research proposal and a preliminary book proposal.
May-14	David Rousseau, Victor Asal	$2,727	Pilot project utilizing Twitter data to measure ethnic conflict	REPORT
			After learning how to extract, store, code, visualize, and analyze the Twitter data, we plan to apply for large scale funding for both analysis of social media and telephone survey data to benchmark against.
Apr-14	Matthew Ingram	$2,000	Additional funding for preliminary work on building a geo-referenced data set on violence and predictors of violence at the subnational level for all Latin American countries.
			This funding, added to an internal award received from the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, will enable me to accomplish preliminary work to make future proposals more attractive to potential Federal funders.
Nov-13	David Matkin	$1,950	Natural Language Processing and Harvesting of Public Pension Data (Preliminary Study)	REPORT
			This preliminary study will test the possibility of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to harvest public pension data relative to legislative actions from fifteen years of reports published by the National Conference of State Legislators. The outcomes from this study will be used to obtain external funding to capture information on additional pension characteristics.