What ECEE offers you

The small number of awardees chosen will receive an unusually high level of research support from IQSS infrastructure and personnel, all designed to supercharge their research and help them collect the necessary extraordinary evidence for their extraordinary claim.

Finite resources will go farther if the projects selected not only are likely to be able to move the dominant position of the scientific community the farthest distance – but also make the best use of existing or proposed IQSS research infrastructure. Examples may include a semester or two of dedicated full-time help from a professional data scientist, survey research experts, or computer programmers; unusual help from the IQSS Data Science Services team on issues of research design, data organization, cleaning and visualization, code organization and selection and interpretation of statistical methods; assistance in setting up and running high performance computing resources; access to extensive data curation services; or leveraging the Dataverse platform. Other possibilities include building your research efforts as an IQSS scientific program, with extensive research and administrative services or space, or using IQSS incubation services, under which many research projects have become ongoing scientific programs, independent programs elsewhere at Harvard, external nonprofits, and commercial startups.

Using existing infrastructure in this way is far more efficient than hiring someone anew for every project, as is current practice in too many areas. Similarly, if you need a piece of software built to spec precisely tuned for your work, but which could also be used by others later on, IQSS funding could then go further than if you ask for software that could only be used for your project. If what you need is something very specific for you or your work, such as your salary for the summer or (in the professional schools) a percentage of effort, IQSS’ world class sponsored research operation can also help you seek funds separately.