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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). 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 has recently modified the CCSA program to better serve academic researchers. Under today's guidelines, our single-investigator CCSA (SI-CCSA) program provides research support for early career faculty with interests in the fields of chemistry, physics and astronomy and in closely related fields that overlap significantly with these three disciplines.
In addition, we've begun a new initiative, the multi-investigator CCSA program (MI-CCSA), to encourage early career faculty to establish in-house, interdisciplinary research collaborations. We hope that faculty and administrators will embrace the interdisciplinary model emphasized in MI-CCSA, and that our programs will continue to assist faculty to conduct frontier research with undergraduates.
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. Also, keep us updated about how you are integrating your research into your teaching practices by sending us materials that we will post on our website. 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 one of our program officers.
- Scialog®
- Cottrell College Science Awards
- About the Program
- Single-Investigator
- How to Apply
- Guidelines
- Eligibility Quiz
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Multi-Investigator
- How to Apply
- Eligible Institutions
- Eligibility Quiz
- Science Advisory Committee
- Awards Database
- In the News
- Cottrell Scholar Awards
- AZ Partners in Science
- Awardee Profiles
- Awards Database 1994 - Present
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