Opportunities for Caltech PIs
RSI Small-Scale Proposals
RSI's small-scale grants are open to lead PIs who have their primary affiliation with one of Caltech's academic divisions and the ability to conduct research on campus. The program prioritizes funding proposals addressing significant challenges and opportunities associated with climate change and the stewardship of natural resources.
The Fall 2020 Small-Scale Proposal application period closed on November 10, 2020. Applicant feedback will be provided as soon as possible. The next call will open in Spring of 2021. Please see our Small-Scale Proposal Submission Page for further information.
RSI Large-Scale Proposals
RSI invites the development of larger scale proposals from Caltech's professorial faculty, that leverage Caltech's unique strengths in fundamental science and engineering towards delivering real world solutions to environmental challenges. Interested PIs should seek guidance from RSI leadership after using their Access.Caltech credentials to review the information on the Large-Scale Proposal Submission Page.
2020 Research Grants
RSI announced support for 18 seed projects in Fall of 2020. These projects will be led by faculty from four campus Divisions, and include several collaborations with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This first round of funded proposals includes research into turning bio-waste into sustainable structural materials (see figure above), using natural experiments to determine the result of increased atmospheric CO2 on the growth of plant and forest ecosystems, cultivating symbiotic relationships between soil microbes and plant roots for more resilient crops, and the development of new energy storage devices and new electricity markets to enable the transition to renewable power systems. In addition, RSI will support a larger scale effort to adapt Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), a groundbreaking new tool for seismic monitoring, to the task of accurately measuring the filling and emptying of underground water reservoirs.