Care Giver Grants

PURPOSE

As the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted, caregiving responsibilities produce inequitable impacts on researcher productivity, especially early—and mid-career researchers, threatening to widen existing gaps. The AC’s caregiving grants will provide research funding support to Associate and Assistant Professors members with caregiving responsibilities. These resources aim to mitigate the impact of caregiving duties by maintaining research group productivity during caregiving leave.  

OPPORTUNITY

Associate and Assistant Faculty can apply for up to $90,000 for one year to provide additional support to maintain the productivity of their research group while on long-term leave.  

This funding can support but is not limited to the following items.

• Research Associate

• Post-Doctoral Fellows

• Lab Manager

• Other supports that facilitate research group productivity during the absence of the principal investigator  

ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS

1. An Associate or Assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

2. On a long-term (>3 months) parental, pregnancy, or caregiving leave during the funding period.  Training, sabbatical, or administrative leaves are not eligible.

3. Applicant should be a full or affiliate member of the Acceleration Consortium (AC). The AC’s membership application can be found here: link).  

4. Planning to support research relevant to the AC. This can include research across physical, life, computational, and social science domains relevant to, but not limited to, the following:

• the development of self-driving labs (SDLs) or the development of the AI and automation tools required to build SDLs,

• the use of SDLs for materials or molecule discovery,

• policy or other frameworks to support the ethical use and uptake of SDLs, or

• the implications (ethics, economic, social, etc.) of AI and automation for accelerated discovery and the community-based use of these technologies.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

Applications will be evaluated based on need, the utility/benefit the funding will provide, and the relevance of the PI’s research to the AC.  

APPLICATION

Funding applications will be accepted twice a year:  

• July 30^th

• Dec 20^th  

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

1. Description of how the caregiver funding will support your research program with budget justification (1500 characters max)

2. Description of AC-relevant aspects of the research program (2000 characters max)

3. Budget Justification (800 characters max) (CFREF financial eligibility guidelines)  

4. The time frame for requested funding (3 months up to one year)

5. Short CV ~ 5 pages

6. Sign-off by the PI’s unit head with a description of any other supports provided.

7. All applicants to this funding opportunity are required to complete a brief self-identification survey; a link to the survey will be sent to you directly. In completing this survey, applicants may voluntarily self-identify in all applicable groups, or they may select "prefer not to answer" in response to any of the questions. Self-identification data is important to the Acceleration Consortium's ability to identify barriers to participation and to develop strategies to eliminate these barriers. Any information directly related to you is confidential and cannot be accessed by program administrators or AC leadership. Aggregated results as of the closing of this posting may be shared with only a small number of designated administrators on a need-to-know basis.  

Application: https://airtable.com/appWoB7hOLsK5RC0X/pagzLFYPQcO4vkUEQ/form

SELF IDENTIFICATION DEMOGRAPHIC DATA SURVEY

The AC requires accurate demographic data to understand the diversity of our community and to monitor our progress toward implementing EDI principles. All applicants to Care-Giver Support grants will therefore be required to complete a brief self-identification survey to be considered for funding; a survey invitation will be sent to you directly. While completion of the survey is mandatory, you may select “prefer not to answer” in response to any of the questions. Any information directly related to you will be held confidentially, and only aggregated, deidentified information will be shared for the purposes of reporting.

REPORTING REQUIREMENTS

Recipients will be asked to complete a brief report or survey on outcomes/the impact of the funding to assist with program assessment and CFREF performance metrics.