Innovative Research Program
An internal, competitive program of CIRES, IRPs support novel research that might otherwise be difficult to fund
Innovative Research Program
An internal, competitive program of CIRES, IRPs support novel research that might otherwise be difficult to fund
Submissions due 03/10/2026
IRP Submissions
Open for submissions on January 20th 12:00am, 2026 to March 10th 11:59pm, 2026 *Mountain Time Zone
The Innovative Research Program is designed to stimulate a creative research environment within CIRES and to encourage synergy between disciplines and research colleagues. The intent is to support small research efforts that can quickly provide concept viability or rule out further consideration. The program encourages novel, unconventional, or fundamental research that might otherwise be difficult to fund. Funded projects are inventive, sometimes opportunistic, and do not necessarily have an immediate practical application or guarantee of success. This program supports pilot or exploratory studies, which may provide rapid results. Activities are not tightly restricted and can range from instrument development, lab testing, and field observations to model development, evaluation, and application.
IRP proposals will be accepted from January 20, 2026 until March 10, 2026.
The Innovative Research Program (IRP) program manager and members of the Proposal team will host informal information sessions to answer questions about the program requirements and to provide support for budget preparation. Cookies and tea will be provided.
- Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 1 - 2 pm, Map Room, CIRES 340
- Wednesday, February 25, 2026, 1 - 2 pm, DSRC, GB124
- Friday, March 6, 2026, 1 - 2 pm, on Zoom
CIRES also supports a "Rapid IRP" that may provide funds for research activities that are time-sensitive and urgent. Potential CIRES proposers should see the email or reach out to the Director of Access and Cultural Innovation for more information.
Eligibility
- CIRES Research Scientists, Associate Scientists and Professors may serve as PIs. Post-docs are not eligible to serve as PIs.
- CIRES graduate students and post-docs may submit a proposal but a CIRES Research Scientist or Professor must serve as PI.
- Associate scientists must have support of the proposal from their supervisor. Please have the supervisor email Becca.Edwards@colorado.edu confirming their support of the proposal.
- A researcher may only be listed as a PI or contributor on ONE proposal for each competition. Multiple submissions in a given year will disqualify all applications with the individual listed.
- If a researcher is part of a team receiving an IRP, that individual is not eligible to apply (or be part of an application team) the following year. There was no application cycle for 2025; therefore 2024 IRP awardees are not eligible for the 2026 application cycle. If an application is submitted that includes the individual, the application will be disqualified.
Proposal Requirements
- Proposals cannot exceed three pages, using 12-point font and single space. References can be separate. Examples of successful proposals from past competitions can be found HERE.
- Proposals may include investigators outside of CIRES if they are integral to the outcome.
- Project budget should total $30,000 in direct costs.
- A general budget may be created for the proposal. Should you be funded, you will work with our finance team to develop a complete and detailed budget.
- Workshops or the acquisition of normal tools such as computers are discouraged.
- All research and spending must be completed within the 18 month project period (18 months). No exceptions.
- Awardees must present the results of the work at the Annual IRP poster session at the end of their award (in November).
Innovative Research Proposal awards have many benefits for CIRES researchers, such as seeding research that could allow for larger proposals, funding early career researchers, and facilitating conference presentations and publications on the novel work.
"I personally feel that the IRP funding has been a huge success at a minimum for better preparing me, my plans for the instruments, and capabilities in the lab for if/when the project receives new funding from NSF. It's been a huge learning experience for me. -Lastly, it is not a goal of CIRES IRP but I would estimate that 8 ATOC undergraduate and 6 ATOC graduate students got to spend at least a day in the field helping on the project. There were 4 undergraduate and 1 graduate students that spent significant time in the field and in the lab working on the project. Two of the undergraduate students co-presented the poster with me at the IRP poster session a year ago."
~ Mark Seefelt, NSIDC, Modifications to the Ott Pluvio2 Precipitation Gauge for Year-round Measurement of Precipitation at Remote Locations in Antarctica, 2022
“With CIRES IRP support, I led my first global study on mangrove ecosystem stability, demonstrating that extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and droughts, drive structural homogenization worldwide. The project also offered mentoring opportunities to graduate and early-career researchers and provided training for approximately 25 CIRES colleagues. I truly appreciated the CIRES IRP for enabling this opportunity, which advanced global science and also fostered workforce development, open-source innovation, and training in environmental data science.”
~ Cibele Amaral, ESIIL and Earth Lab, BioExtremes - the role of Biodiversity in mangrove ecosystem response to Extreme events, 2023
“The CIRES IRP grant allowed us to conduct research that helped to answer environmental exposure concerns around wildfire impacts. We were able to do research driven by community interest and highlight new areas for further investigation around indoor smoke impacts and structural emissions.”
~ Will Dresser, Chemistry, Measurements of Volatile Organic Compounds Released from the Burning of Structural Materials, 2023
“As a by-product of our proposed satellite data analysis, we noticed that the diurnal cycle of cloud fraction in the North Atlantic trade wind region has some obvious longitudinal dependence. This signal was interesting and robust to us, but we still had some doubts because it was different from published work. After I shared this result in an informal presentation, one of our team members from Delft University of Technology mentioned that he also got the same signal but through a more quantitative analysis! Like us, he had a similar doubt on his results. But attending this meeting helped both of us gain confidence about this seemingly unreported signal in the satellite data, and provided me an opportunity to collaborate further with him on the proposed IRP project.”
~ Xuanyu Chen, PSL, Examine downstream impacts of mesoscale sea surface temperature anomalies on trade cumulus clouds and their radiative effects using satellite observations, 2024
"A successful proposal for a National Park Service grant was the result of my interest in GNSS-IR generated by this IRP project and the experience our group had gained from it. The IRP award also facilitated follow-up field campaigns involving the deployment of 7 low cost, GNSS-IR instruments to Slumgullion landslide in Colorado for data collection."
~ Kristy Tiampo, ESOC, Quantifying the impact of water storage changes on earthquake seismicity from integrated satellite geodesy, 2018
"The IRP funding ($10K) was used to support a graduate student programmer (Aamna Sirohey) to develop a tool for analysis of CrowdMag "Observatory Mode" beta test results. The code is fundamental now to our on-going tests using data collected from the Deadhorse magnetic observatory in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Results of analysis have demonstrated the ability of smartphone magnetometers to detect space weather magnetic disturbances."
~ Rick Saltus, NCEI, Improving world magnetic models with CrowdMag Flight-Mode, 2020