On Sept. 2, the University of Michigan announced they would award nearly $1 million in Accelerate funding grants to ten University research groups as part of the Bold Challenges Initiative. Accelerate will provide consulting and seed funding of up to $125,000 to selected researchers, funding innovative and large interdisciplinary projects. These projects include attempts to improve access to disability interventions in early childhood and investigating cardiac metabolism in heart failure cases.
In an email to The Michigan Daily, Jill Jividen, assistant vice president for research development in the Office of Research Development, said Bold Challenges works to bring together teams across university colleges and campuses to leverage their different scientific and scholarly strengths.
“It’s an engine for sharing big ideas, developing and advancing cutting-edge research, and tapping into university expertise to save and improve lives,” Jividen wrote. “After just three years, we have supported more than 50 amazing faculty teams tackling everything from climate-resilient infrastructure to improving sepsis outcomes to advancing sustainable aviation to helping under-resourced neighborhoods better adapt to digital technologies.”
Bold Challenges, an Office of Vice President for Research development initiative, also announced eight teams for their 2025-2026 Boost cohort, a semester-long program to assist newly formed teams of interdisciplinary researchers.
In an interview with The Daily, Chinedum Okwudire, professor of mechanical engineering, said Bold Challenges and the Accelerate program facilitate collaborative opportunities across colleges within the University, following a successful workshop in May where he was able to bring faculty from across campus together to discuss distributed manufacturing.
“Bold Challenges gives us the opportunity to reign experts from the business school, from social research, from environmental research, from engineering and other places to think about the different aspects of the problem or the opportunity,” Okwudire said.
One of the projects recently funded by Accelerate is “Improving Access to Early Interventions for Children with Disabilities,” led by Christina Weiland, professor of public policy and co-director of the Education Policy Initiative. Catherine Asher, assistant research scientist for the project at the Youth Policy Lab, said making connections with the people implementing and overseeing policies through interdisciplinary collaborations is crucial for impact.
“You have to be connected to folks outside academia or outside of industry; you have to be connected to folks in local or state or national government who are actually making policies and determining how programs are administered and run and overseen,” Asher said. “(This opportunity) really provides space and time for us as researchers to start making those connections, building that relationship and collaborating without partners at the state to make sure that the work we’re doing is really mutually beneficial and has implications for the real timely challenges that they’re facing and trying to address.”
Looking to the future, Jividen said OVPR is working on various initiatives to increase accessibility of their resources for faculty researchers.
“OVPR is preparing to launch an exciting new portal to make the office’s valuable resources, services and funding easier for faculty to access –– that includes helping them find Bold Challenges opportunities,” Jividen wrote. “In addition, VPR has recently established a Strategic Intelligence team, which is focused on curating data sources to predict emerging research priorities. If we can put that intel to work, we’ll have a better idea of how Bold Challenges can prepare our researchers for future funding opportunities and of where the university should invest resources to sustain and grow U-M’s research leadership.”
Daily Staff Reporter Aanya Panyadahundi can be reached at aanyatp@umich.edu.
