2024-2025 Request for Proposals
Our 2024-2025 Request for Proposals has closed. You can review 2024-2025 Seed Grant Awardees below!
Proposals on a wide range of topics related to the population sciences are invited. Of particular interest is research that addresses one of CDE’s core research areas:
- Families & Family Change
- Health and Biodemography
- Inequality, Poverty, Wealth & Mobility
- Spatial and Environmental Demography
- Gender & Reproductive Health
Please include how your research aligns with NICHD research priorities in your application: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/der/branches/pdb
All CDE faculty affiliates, scientist affiliates, and research affiliates are invited to apply. Grants can be single- or multi-investigator.
Grants will range in value from $5,000 to $20,000. We anticipate that the average grant will be $5,000-10,000 and can support Summer research assistance, one-semester research assistance, data purchases, or a Summer salary month.
For early career investigators, the grant will be awarded with an additional stipend ($1,500) for a senior faculty mentor to provide advice on drafts of the grant application that builds on the seed grant research.
By May 24th, please submit a 2-3 page application to cde@ssc.wisc.edu that contains:
- Specific Aims
- Significance
- Innovation
- Methods
- Timeline, including specific plans for grant writing and submission
- Statement about IRB / or plans for submission
A template for the application is here, though this format is not required.
The CDE Development Core Director, Marcy Carlson, will solicit reviews from two to three tenured CDE faculty who did not submit proposals for each submission. Reviewers will be selected from at least two colleges represented by CDE and will include faculty members from across CDE’s research areas.
We expect to notify awarded projects by June 24, 2024. Awarded projects must demonstrate IRB approval before funding can be released.
Proposals will be evaluated for
- connection to CDE’s key research areas;
- potential impact of research on the field of population sciences;
- probability that the research will result in grant submission to NIH within 12 months of award. It is critical that seed grant awards lead to external grant applications for the CDE seed grant program to be funded by NIH in the future; and
- credentials of investigators.
Early career (assistant- or associate-level) investigators are particularly encouraged to apply. Interdisciplinary multi-investigator teams are also encouraged to apply.
The number of awards CDE makes will vary to year to year based on the number and size of the requests. We expect to fund on average 2-4 projects per year.
2024-2024 Seed Grant Awardees
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Pilot for a Longitudinal Study of Urban Informal Settlements – India (LSUS-I)
Awardee: Priya Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Agricultural & Applied Economics
Description: Designing appropriate social safety nets to protect the vulnerable in urban areas is crucial to safeguarding their welfare, and timing is critical considering rapid urbanization and the increasing risks posed both by pandemics as well as climate change. The goal of this project is to be a first step in setting up a survey that would follow households over time and collect information of both wellbeing and the shocks they face, to inform policy action. The full-scale study will cover over 7,000 households (about 20,000-30,000 households) across the informal settlements in Delhi – the largest urban area in the world after Tokyo, and the fastest growing city with ballooning informal settlements.
Refining the Measurement of Healthcare Provider-Based Contraceptive Coercion and Disseminating National Pilot Finding
Awardee: Laura Swan, Senior Research Scientist, Reproductive Equity Action Lab
Description: Across U.S. history, social norms, governmental policies, and public health programs have promoted the reproduction of some groups, such as affluent cisgender white women, and restricted that of others, such as poor women and women of color. Furthermore, qualitative research has documented patient and provider accounts of healthcare providers explicitly and implicitly promoting certain birth control methods and discouraging others, with these practices occurring differentially based on provider biases and patient demographic characteristics. Despite growing concerns over coercion in contraceptive care, including criticisms of LARC-first contraceptive counseling, which prioritizes long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) over other methods, few studies have described the frequency and manifestations of provider-based contraceptive coercion, and there is no established method of measuring this construct. To address these knowledge gaps, this research aims to document experiences of contraceptive coercion and highlight ways that contraceptive care can better promote reproductive autonomy.
County-level connectedness and rural death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic
Awardee: Malia Jones, Assistant Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology
Description: During the COVID-19 pandemic, rural places in the United States fared worse than suburban and urban places in terms of death rates per capita. Previous work has focused on COVID-19 death rates within each county, finding that age is an important predictor of mortality rates, but far from the only predictor. Here, we ask if the degree of daily commuting between counties explains variation in the COVID-19 case and death rates during the Delta-Omicron phase of the pandemic, roughly July 2021 – March 2022. Further, we investigate the age- and sex-specific death rates in this time period to identify whether there was rural penalty in mortality among working-aged people, specifically parents of school-aged children.
Using publicly available data, we construct a county-level data set which includes commuter flows between all counties in the United States, demographic data, age- and sex-specific all-cause mortality, and daily COVID-19 case and death rates. We identify the degree to which connectedness explains age- and sex-specific death rates using a multilevel modeling approach, and identify spatial clusters of high mortality rates among parent-aged people. Identifying the role of commuter flows is an important step toward more accurate, locally tuned models of infectious disease spread and represents an important methodological and theoretical advance in our understanding of the social determinants of infectious disease.