Investing in Emory’s bright ideas: Peer-awarded grants launch projects across the university

By Tony Van Witsen May 1, 2026

historical photo of a man looking into a microscope next to a present day photo of a woman working in a lab

For nearly 90 years, University Research Committee awards have been funding new research projects from all Emory departments. This year, funding will double. Discover a few of the groundbreaking ideas supported by the award.

As most faculty members know from hard-won experience, some topics and problems are easier to find funding for than others.

Researchers who want to explore new ideas that lack an existing trail of previous findings frequently express concern that the big funder — governmental and philanthropic — can be difficult to access. This can include scholars who want to look at a long-established subject from a new perspective or teams of researchers from different disciplines who want to investigate a topic at the intersection of their specialties.

Challenges like these are what Emory’s University Research Committee (URC) was designed to address. For nearly 90 years, committee grants have supported groundbreaking, high-quality research from every academic department of the university through a competitive peer-review process, with an emphasis on innovative discoveries that could make a difference in the real world.  

Beginning this year, the university will double funding for the program to $2 million annually, Provost Badia Ahad announced this spring.

The support is vital fuel for Emory’s research engine, according to environmental sciences professor Eri Saikawa. “I know from my experience that a seed grant like URC’s is essential, not only for starting a new project but also for expanding research areas and fostering new collaborations,” says Saikawa, who serves as faculty co-director of URC along with Roger Deal, associate professor of biology.

“We are thrilled with this expansion of the budget, which helped us increase the success rate to 40-50% for each category,” Saikawa says.

This month, the committee announced nearly 70 new awards to Emory faculty — roughly twice as many as in previous years. 

Emory doubled URC funding this year to $2 million—supporting 70 new faculty research projects.

Founded in 1939, as Emory was launching its first PhD programs, the URC is among the oldest of its kind in the nation. Emory was working hard to establish itself as a major research university, and leaders decided to create a University Research Council to administer a fund for the promotion of faculty research.

Early grants were small, sometimes under ten dollars. One grant for $45 was awarded to eminent physicist Robert Lagemann, who went on to work on the Manhattan Project, developing the first nuclear weapons. By 1982, applications had grown to 130, with total awards amounting to more than a third of a million dollars.   

Today, the URC awards seed grants funded by Emory’s endowment, with a review panel that includes more than 100 Emory faculty volunteers — a tradition that has frequently given younger faculty their first experience reviewing grants.

The program represents a unique aspect of Emory’s overall internal research funding, which reached $346 million in the last fiscal year — the largest amount ever reported. It means for every dollar of funding Emory received from external sources, the University also spent $0.37 of its own funds on research. Today, Emory has more than 40 seed funding programs, but URC continues to be the largest.

As previous faculty recipients have demonstrated, those grants can pave the way not only to follow-on external funding but to discoveries and innovations that make a difference in lives around the world. Keep reading to learn more. 


Read how the URC is helping fund unique research across Emory


Jessica Fairley, professor of infectious diseases, conducted research in Ethiopia showing that leprosy is spread not just by human-to-human contact, but also by poor water, sanitation and hygiene. “In the last 20 years, we haven’t gotten below 200,000 new cases per year,” Fairley says. “My question was, why is this persisting in certain places? What was going on?”

Read about her work: Uncovering how leprosy persists 


Thomas Gillespie, professor of environmental sciences, researches the effects of anthropogenic environmental change on biodiversity and on the spread of diseases between people and wildlife. “The URC grants allow faculty who’ve been at the university for just a few years to take a risk in doing something that could be very innovative,” he says. “The most valuable thing is that it creates a space for innovation.” 

Read about his work: Searching for clues about animal-human disease transmission


Nicholas Giordano, assistant professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, in partnership with Mara Schenker, professor of orthopedics in the School of Medicine, researched new care models to help orthopedic trauma patients deal with post-surgical pain with less reliance on addictive painkillers. “I was an assistant professor who had just moved to Emory and was trying to launch a research career,” Giordano says, while Schenker adds, “I never in a million years could have done this without Nick. The URC grant set us up for doing significant work in pain research that has made it into multiple publications.”

Read about their work: Pioneering a new care model for managing post-trauma pain


Hayk Harutyunyan, professor of physics, funded for pioneering work on nanophotonics, explores the strange phenomena that occur when light is reduced to an infinitely tiny scale. “The URC can afford not to be bureaucratic,” he says. “There’s no requirement to prove that this is actually feasible. On the contrary, they encourage you to use this as a stepping stone to something new.”

Read about his work: Exploring nanoscale light and the impact on ultrafast computers


George Staib, professor of dance and movement studies, is also the founder of a dance company, Staibdance. The URC helped fund research and development on a new modern ballet, “Ararat,” about the Armenian genocide in 1915. “The URC understands this is experimental,” he says. “This opportunity to take a chance and put this story into the world was an unparalleled gift and suggests there’s faith in telling a story through art.”

Read about his work: Expressing stories of survival through dance


Emory’s University Research Commitee by the numbers: 

  • Emory’s URC seed funding program has produced a 9x return on investment in recent years.
  • In 2026, Provost Badia Ahad announced a 2x expansion of URC grant funding.
  • URC is the oldest and largest of Emory’s 40 internal seed funding programs.
  • Emory invested $346 million in overall internal research support in FY25.

Cumulative data for FY21-25:

  • 437 applications
  • 174 URC awards
  • $4.85 million in URC funds issued
  • 106 resulting publications
  • 141 external proposals submitted following URC pilots
  • 44 external awards won
  • $48.79 million in external funding awarded

Tags

Recent News