The fund has an annual budget of $400,000 and will complement two other schemes under the university Chancellor’s Fund for Innovation and Collaboration.

University of Arkansas on Friday launched a new subunit of its Chancellor’s Fund for Innovation and Collaboration catered to faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral candidates who have completed its leg of the National I-Corps training program. The Gap Fund will invest up to $400,000 each year across three bands – one pool offers up to $30,000 for prototype development and testing, while the others supply up to $35,000 for applicants completing a post-doctoral fellowship in commercialisation who are either working or awaiting a response on research proposals. Applications to the Gap Fund will be accepted on a rolling basis. Arkansas’s National I-Corps is a seven-week course funded by US government-owned research agency National Science Foundation that awards up to $500,000 in grant funding. There are now three subsets of Chancellor’s Fund for Innovation and Collaboration, the others being the recently-announced Commercialization Fund and the Innovation and Collaboration Fund. Commercialization Fund will begin accepting applications in spring 2019 for a total of $1m in funding made available each year for Arkansas technologies that are either ready to commercialise or else have strong market potential. Cheque sizes for the program will range from $5,000 to $50,000, though there is no limit to submissions or awards for each applicant. Innovation and Collaboration Fund will award a total of $1m to seed-stage proposals based on interdisciplinary research that have not received prior funding. It is designed to support projects that lead to discovery and drive progress towards the university’s signature and strategic research objectives.

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