Annual Research Grants
The Annual Research Grant (ARG) Program provides support for non-salary expenses incurred in the conduct of a specific research or scholarship project.
Award Amounts
- An ARG provides between $5,000 and $10,000 in funding to facilitate new or on-going research or scholarship that could not be conducted or completed without the support.
- Awards are made in the Fall semester, to cover expenses incurred through the end of the following summer.
Eligibility
- All full-time teaching members of the Main Campus faculty, with the exception of those in the McDonough School of Business, are eligible to apply.
- Faculty are encouraged to combine an ARG with other Georgetown support, for example with a Summer Salary Supplement from the Provost’s Office, with school-based research funds, or with funds from their research accounts.
Selection Criteria
Subject to satisfying the eligibility criteria above, selection of proposals will be based on the following criteria:
- Quality: applicants should explain in broadly accessible language the contribution their proposed research or scholarship will make to the literature or repertoire, and any future work to which it will lead.
- Feasibility: applicants should present a clear and detailed plan for how the research/scholarship will be executed.
- Value for money: A detailed budget, including where applicable items financed from other sources, should demonstrate how resources will be used efficiently to execute the project.
- Credentials: applicants should explain how their track record, or in the case of junior faculty, their promise of future achievements, supports the notion that the proposed work will be successful
Application
Applications consist of a project narrative of up to 1,000 words, a budget, and a current CV. The narrative will address the issues of quality and feasibility outlined above, and include a description of the nature of the proposed research and its central hypothesis, the site, methodology, data, collaborations, and other inputs into the work, and the expected outcomes in terms of publications, other products, grant applications, performances, seminars, etc.
A budget detailing specific items and costs should be submitted. Allowable items include travel, materials and supplies, research assistants, data and data collection, etc. Funding cannot be used to pay faculty salaries or other direct compensation. If other funds, secured or pending, are to be used in combination with the ARG, these should be identified and included in the budget. A succinct budget narrative should also be included.
Your submission will be reviewed by faculty colleagues outside of your department, but in a related field. Please take this into account when crafting the language of your proposal.
Applications should be submitted via GU-PASS.
Application will open in late August 2026.
Deliverable
Recipients should submit a 200 word description of the activities that were conducted and made possible with the award by September 30 following the date of the award, with links, if available, to electronic copies of any materials – publications, working papers, reports, etc. – produced as a result.
The deliverable can be uploaded in GU-PASS. Instructions for uploading the deliverable may be
found in this User Guide.
Faculty members who do not submit a deliverable as required will be ineligible for future internal grants.
A one-time six-month No-Cost Extension (NCE) can be requested in GU-PASS, by following the instructions in this job aid.
Previous Awardees
2025
| PI Name | PI Department | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Kristen Looney | School of Foreign Service | Rural Governance in an Urbanizing China |
| Derek Baron | Performing Arts | “Mediating Memory: Etahdleuh Doanmoe, Kiowa Song, and the Carceral Geographies of American Music |
| Brian Griffiths | Earth Commons | Mapping Spatial Differences in DNA at Amazonian Mineral Licks |
| Andrew Bickford | Anthropology | Spy Tours: Espionage, Tourism, and the Allure of Secrecy |
| Diana Kapiszewski | Government | Institutions of Government Accountability in Contemporary Latin America |
| Benjamin J Harbert | Performing Arts | Listening Guide to Incarceration: Animated Visualizations of Carceral Sound |
| Yifan (Flora) He | School of Foreign Service | The environmental costs of a politically motivated rural land reform |
| Elena M Silva | Biology | Resolving the Sox21 Paradox: Context-Dependent Regulation of Neural Stem Cell Fate |
| Radha Venkatagiri | Computer Science | Reliability of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) |
| Mike Amezcua | History | Dinero: A History of Latino Capitalism in America |
2024
| PI Name | PI Department | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Brian Griffiths | Earth Commons | Camera Trapping for Sustainability in Maijuna Lands |
| Kristin Perkins | Sociology | Children’s Heterogeneous Experiences in Shared Households |
| Jay Hammond | Performing Arts | No Coming, No Going: Buddhist and Christian Ways of Mourning |
| Denise E Brennan | Anthropology | Work through Disaster: Labor Amidst Climate Ruin |
| Emma Smith | School of Foreign Service | Deterrence Effects of Stigma? Beliefs, Preferences, and Consequences |
| Sarah Adel Bargal | Computer Science | Concept Erasure and Immunization for Generative AI Diffusion Models |
| Tiago Ventura | McCourt School | Partisan Motivated Reasoning Trumps Prior Exposure to Misinformation: Understanding the Effects of Exposure to Falsehoods Online. |
| Kathryn M. de Luna | History | The Shing’andu Family of Basanga: Exploring an ‘Introverted’ Microhistory Approach |
| Megan Lickley | Earth Commons | Monitoring Progress on the Montreal Protocol through modeling the production, emissions and transport of halocarbons |
| Rodrigo A. Maillard | Chemistry | Annual Research Grant: Expanding Drug Discovery by Combining In Vitro Translation Systems with Single Molecule Techniques |
| You-Me Park | Women’s and Gender Studies | In Passing: Affective Labor and Expendability in Elder Care |
2023
| PI Name | PI Department | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Melanie White | Black Studies | The Black Central Americas Project: Phase I – Mapping Black Central America |
| Andrea Marie Headley | McCourt School | A Community-Based Participatory Research Design to Evaluate Police Training for Reducing Harm: Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement and Implicit Bias |
| Dagomar Degroot | History | Cosmic Contamination: Inside The Cold War Effort to Protect Worlds From Alien Microbes |
| Krista Ruffini | McCourt School | Financial Incentives to Increase Nursing Home Staffing and Improve Resident Outcomes |
| Katherine A Benton-Cohen | History | Open-Pit Capitalism: The Family Fortune that Transformed New York, the American Southwest, and the Modern Middle East |
| Diana Kapiszewski | Government | Institutions of Government Accountability in Contemporary Latin America |
| Katharine M. Donato | School of Foreign Service | Integration of U.S. Immigrants who entered as Unaccompanied Minors: Changing the Narrative |
| Rebecca Helm | Earth Commons | Characterizing the light environment of the ocean’s surface |
| Andrew Bickford | Anthropology | Was I a Spy? Soldiers, Secrets, Espionage, and Memory in Cold War Berlin |
| Edward R Van Keuren | Physics | Investigation of drug encapsulation in polymer nanoparticles |
| Sarah Adel Bargal | Computer Science | Robustness to Partial Visual Occlusions for Object Classification in Images |
2022
| PI Name | PI Department | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Christian Wolf | Chemistry | Purchase and Installation of a Refurbished 400 MHz NMR Autosample Changer |
| Melanie White | Black Studies | What Dem Do to We No Have Name: Intimate Colonial Violence and Black Feminist Counter-Intimacies on the Mosquito Coast |
| Emily C Francomano | Spanish & Portuguese | Exemplary Women: Fiction and the Debate on Women in the Fifteenth Century |
| Ahmad Alqassas | Arabic and Islamic Studies | Comparative Syntax of Modern Arabic |
| Denise E Brennan | Anthropology | Disaster Work: Labor and Trafficking Amidst Climate Ruin |
| Johann Le Guelte | French | Uncovering the Colonial Lens: Creation and Subversion of the French Visual Empire |
| Jonathan M Ladd | McCourt School | A Proposed 2023 Survey on Americans’ Reactions to Economic and Informational Globalization |
| Katherine A Benton-Cohen | History | Quiet Money: How The Phelps-Dodge Family Transformed New York, the American Southwest and the Middle East |
| Kathryn M. de Luna | History | Toward an Intellectual History of Enslaved Africans in the Atlantic World (research grant) |
| Leanne Doughty | Physics | Investigating student engagement in computational thinking practices in introductory physics |
| Matthew B Hamilton | Biology | Ecological genetics of the salt marsh plants Spartina patens and S. alterniflora |
| Pauliina Patana | School of Foreign Service | Residential Constraints and the Political Geography of the Populist Radical Right |
2021
| PI Name | PI Department | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Jeffrey Huang | Biology | Tempering adipocyte exuberance in obesity |
| Dagomar Degroot | History | Ripples in the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of the Solar System |
| Sarah L Stoll | Chemistry | Synthesis of Metal Halide Nanoparticles |
| Alexandra DeCandia | Biology | Microbial natural history and disease in Channel Island foxes (Urocyon littoralis) and island spotted skunks (Spilogale gracilis amphiala) |
| Michael T. Williams | Performing Arts | Creative Research for ‘Dad Rock’: a poetry-theatre hybrid work by Asst. Prof. of the Practice Michael T. Williams |
| Jay Hammond | Performing Arts | Enacting the Circle | Prototyping at Lobe in Vancouver |
| Brian J McCabe | Sociology | American Voices: Understanding Housing Insecurity and Affordability |
| Jennifer Natalya Fink | English | A Mischief (A Novel) |
| Jessica Roda | School of Foreign Service | Beyond the Sheitl. Women, Performances, and the Reshaping of Orthodoxy in the Digital Age |
| Katherine A Benton-Cohen | History | Phelps Dodge Mining Towns in Twentieth-Century Arizona |
| Christine M Evans | Performing Arts | Three Marys, a chamber opera; and River & Maude, a speculative novel. |
| Hans C Noel | Government | Activist Understandings of Conservatism, Liberalism and Progressivism |
| Leanne Doughty | Physics | Assessing student learning of computational physics in the introductory physics courses |
| Mak Paranjape | Physics | Investigating Silk Fibroin Protein Nanoparticles as a Vehicle for the Delivery of Pulmonary Surfactant to Premature Babies |
| Mark Fisher | Government | Reading Thucydides at the End of History |
| Mark Rom | Government | “We are Rivals, Not Enemies: Fifty Campus Conversations about the 2022 Elections” |
| Peter A Armbruster | Biology | Molecular and physiological basis of overwinter survival in an invasive vector mosquito |
| Sebastian Rainer Jilke | McCourt School | Encouraging Individual Contributions to Public Goods through Psychological Ownership – A Field Experiment on Public Participation |