IDEAS grant recipient team of Rick Haselton, professor of biomedical engineering (right), and David Wright, associate professor of chemistry

Vanderbilt University believes its faculty produce breakthrough research that can advance society — and it’s backing them with its own money. A new program, Innovation and Discovery in Engineering And Science (IDEAS), will provide a one-time investment of more than $3 million in institutional funds to faculty researchers, 11 of whom are from the School of Engineering.

The program is designed to seed innovative, faculty-driven research initiatives. Strikingly, each approved project with an engineering aspect involves collaborations among several faculty members, both in and out of the School of Engineering.

Engineering faculty participating in the awarded projects are Yi Cui, Aniruddha Gokhale, Frederick Haselton, Clare McCabe, Kenneth Pence, Nilanjan Sarkar, Douglas Schmidt, Zhiao Shi, Greg Walker, Robert Weller and Jules White.