Grants & Awards

Cottrell College Science Awards

About the Program

The Cottrell College Science Award (CCSA) program, RCSA's oldest initiative, was created in the early 1970s to promote basic research as a vital component of undergraduate education at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). Single Investigator (SI) - and Multiple Investigator (MI)  initiatives are aimed at helping early career faculty to start active research programs targeting complex scientific problems. Because most modern problems in science require teamwork and often cross-disciplinary approaches, both initiatives promote collaborative work.

Over the decades the CCSA program has consistently:

  • Strengthened teacher-scholars while supporting high-quality research at PUIs;
  • Helped early career faculty to become competitive for federal funding;
  • Encouraged faculty to conduct meaningful collaborative work with undergraduate researchers, and;
  • Enhanced the research culture of numerous science departments at public and private institutions in the United States.

In the last 15 years the CCSA program has supported the research work of approximately 1,300 PUI faculty in over 400 institutions, and has generated research opportunities for thousands of undergraduates at both public and private institutions. These awards, meant to provide seed money to jump-start productive research programs, have proven to be a great tool to engage students in independent research, thus inspiring in them a passion for discovery and self-inquiry. One of our important goals is to motivate students to pursue careers in research and to become the advanced scientific workforce America will need to remain prosperous and safe in the challenging decades to come.

In response to increasingly complex scientific challenges that call for interdisciplinary topics and approaches, RCSA modified the CCSA program to better serve academic researchers.

We invite you to explore our website to learn more about our Foundation and our current programs. If you are trying to find collaborators from either PUIs or research universities, use keywords to search the site for active RCSA awardees and look at the links attached to some of the titles of our awards. Lastly, help us promote our program by serving as a mentor for beginning science faculty in your institution. If you have any questions, please contact us at ccsa@rescorp.org.

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