Social Sciences Research Institute (SSRI)

About SSRI

The Social Sciences Research Institute (SSRI) was founded in 2007 and consists of the following funding and award opportunities:

Faculty Funding

• Collaborative Research Grant
  Encourages collaboration of Rice Social Sciences faculty across disciplines for the development of larger projects leading to research grant proposals to outside funding agencies.
  
• Seed Money Grants
  Provides funding to full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty at all ranks so that they may collect preliminary data or perform preliminary research that will enable them to submit a more competitive proposal to an external funding agency.
  
• Book Manuscript Workshop Grant
  To help faculty develop book manuscripts and, for junior faculty, to create professional connections to scholars outside of Rice University.
  
• Open Access (OA) Publication Grant
  To increase the visibility of SoSS faculty research and disseminate research more quickly. Grants are provided to defray the cost of open-access publication fees.
  
• Proposal Mentoring Grant
  To help faculty submit competitive proposals for external funding.
  
• FACULTY RESEARCH TRAINING GRANT
  To support continuing education for faculty to update or expand their methodological skills and help faculty achieve excellence in research.
• TRAVEL GRANTS FOR NTT FACULTY
  Aims to facilitate the professional development of non-tenure track (NTT) faculty, providing funds to present their work or participate in pedagogical committees at professional conferences.

Faculty Awards

• Dean’s Distinguished Research Awards
  Aim to recognize excellence in faculty research. Two awards will be given, one for junior and senior faculty.
  

Graduate Student Funding

• Pre-Dissertation Research Grants
  Support graduate students conducting preliminary research related to their dissertations so that they may prepare stronger dissertations and submit more competitive dissertation research applications to other funding sources.
  
• Dissertation Research Improvement Grants
  Help alleviate the burden graduate students face when performing their dissertation research. Just like faculty, students have costs associated with their research, such as travel expenses for fieldwork or compensation for human subjects, and this grant program helps defray those costs.

Graduate Student Awards

• John W. Gardner Award
  It is awarded to one graduate student with the best dissertation in the Social Sciences, in the judgment of the Social Sciences Research Institute (SSRI) Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC).