Donors & grants

Amazon Research Awards (ARA) provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. This cycle, ARA announced 26 award recipients who represent 24 universities in seven countries.

Dashun Wang was given this award for his research on creating and designing disruptive teams: Experiments and models for assessing teams’ disruption.

Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content and their potential to impact both the research community and society.

The Department of Defense named Dashun Wang and the Kellogg School of Management a 2018 recipient of the prestigious Minerva Grant. In total, 12 faculty awardees were selected from around the world following a merit competition of approximately 175 applicants across eight categories. Research proposals were peer-reviewed and selected in conference between the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy to identify proposals that make foundational contributions to basic social science and align with the National Defense Strategy.

In a DoD press release about the awards, Dr. Bindu Nair, deputy director of the Basic Research Office, said, “We live in a dynamic world, and many of the challenges we face are social or have social elements to them. Knowledge and methodologies generated from Minerva awardees are an important source of new ideas from the social science community to better understand the social aspects that are inherent to security and stability.”

Learn more about the grant and the Minerva Research Initiative

Beginning in 2021, Dashun Wang will lead a multi-year effort to measure the impact and key drivers of innovation at Northwestern University. The research is supported by a private gift from the Future Wanxiang Foundation, led by Northwestern University Board of Trustees member Pin Ni.

The CSSI team received the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund to develop a comprehensive data-driven framework to systematically track and evaluate state-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CSSI team was awarded a conference grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to consolidate, coordinate, and communicate research in the emerging field of science of science and support community building.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded Dashun Wang a research grant to study the impact of funding and funding schemes on the progress of scientific research by using broad measures and quasi-experimental methods.

Project Title: A National Network for Critical Technology Assessment
CSSI will develop a general framework to assess the overall benefits of AI across scientific disciplines, with a special focus on the three other deep dives (biotechnology, energy, and semiconductors.)

The CSSI team received these funds to gather diverse career data, identify early-career indicators for exceptional individuals and effective teams, and enhance institutional strategies to support outstanding performance across various domains.

CSSI received funds from Wellcome Trust to study how scientists' careers progress by analyzing their career paths in relation to Stokes' Quadrants.

Dashun Wang received a grant from the National Institute of Health from the Division of Program Coordination, Planning and Strategic Initiatives (DPCPSI) within the Office of the Director (OD) to conduct research on factors that determine research productivity.

Dashun Wang’s work on the science of collaborative research, as it relates to team success and failure, received a grant from the National Science Foundation. Under the Foundation’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate, the grant supports interdisciplinary research and training in the social, behavioral and economic sciences, including SBE’s intersections with other science and engineering fields.

Dashun Wang received a grant from Northwestern University’s Data Science Initiative as the principal investigator researching the science behind why teams fail.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) awarded Dashun Wang a grant as part of its Young Investigator Research Program (YIP), which supports scientists and engineers who show exceptional ability and promise. The program is designed to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities to recognize the Air Force’s mission and related challenges in science and engineering.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) awarded Dashun Wang and James Evans the DEEP project: Discovering the Extent of Estimable Prediction in Science and Technology (2015-2019).