Goals

The goals of the Healthy Research Teams & Labs Seed Fund are to identify promising initiatives across the institution, to support the development and delivery of grassroots efforts to enhance the experience of working in research teams at U of T, and to help successful initiatives scale for a wider audience. To advance these goals, proposals must align with at least one of the following priority areas, consistent with the Healthy Research Teams & Labs framework:

• Equity and Belonging: fostering a welcoming, respectful, and fair research community
• Group Collaboration: enhancing the collaborative spirit of our research environments
• Leadership: increasing breadth and depth of research leadership and management expertise 
• Professional Development: increasing capacity to meet trainee professional development needs for diverse careers 
• Research Innovation and Integrity: promoting research curiosity, creativity, innovation, openness, honesty, rigour, and professionalism 
• Supervision and Mentorship: supporting positive supervisory and mentoring relationships that foster empowered learners 
• Well-being: prioritizing work-life balance, health and safety in the research environment, sense of belonging, and welfare

We are particularly interested in proposals for activities that benefit under-served groups in our research ecosystem or that can readily serve as promising practice exemplars for replication by others. 

The Seed Fund is not a research grant. However, proposals that include an original research component may be considered on a case-by-case basis. If applicants wish to include a research component, they should make contact first to discuss eligibility and explain why the fund is the best available support. Any proposal involving research must ensure all ethical and other necessary approvals are in place before undertaking any activity.  

Eligibility

We welcome applications from faculty with graduate faculty membership, librarians, graduate students in good academic standing, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff. While solo applicants are allowed, collaborative applications and trainee co-applicants are particularly welcome. 

Funding amounts

The Seed Fund will support up to $50,000 worth of projects on an annual basis. We will normally hold two calls for applications each year. There is no minimum budget – small proposals are welcome. The maximum award will normally be no more than $5000. If an applicant wishes to propose a larger-scale activity, SGS may consider such requests on a case-by-case basis.

• Funds must be spent within 12 months of an award. A report on funded activities will be due at this time.
• Ineligible costs include basic equipment and software costs, faculty/librarian salary support, and routine conference travel to present academic work. 
• Matched funds, in-kind contributions, or access to supplementary funding are not required but may strengthen a proposal.  
• Applicants unsure of the eligibility of a proposed expense should contact cgpd@utoronto.ca to clarify eligibility. 

Evaluation process

Proposals will be evaluated and approved by CGPD staff and members of the SGS decanal team.

Applications will be assessed on:

1. The potential impact of the proposed initiative, specifically the potential to impact the experience of working in research teams at U of T 
2. The feasibility of the proposed initiative
3. Alignment with the Healthy Research Teams & Labs framework

Proposals that are not funded may be invited to resubmit.

Application information

Interested applicants should submit an expression of interest via email to cgpd@utoronto.ca with the following elements: 

1. A one-paragraph description of the proposed activity. 
2. The proposed budget amount. 
3. Ways in which the learnings or outputs of the proposed initiative will be shared with the University of Toronto community. This could include, for example, blogs, reports, events, templates, webinars, and other guide documents or resources. 

This information will be used to assess eligibility and available support. Applicants requesting $500 or less may be asked additional questions of clarification by the CGPD team. Applicants requesting more than $500 will be asked to submit an application form including a more detailed description of their proposed activity and impact, along with a more detailed budget.  

A signature of approval from the unit head or chair will be requested. A signature of approval from a faculty supervisor will also be required for applications led by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or research staff where no faculty member is a co-applicant.  

As a condition of funding, applicants must produce a brief report at the conclusion of funding designed to be instructive for other U of T research teams. Applications should also detail additional potential outputs. Where suitable, SGS will also facilitate sharing these outputs.

Funded Initiatives

Below you will find brief summaries of funded projects in previous rounds of the seed fund.

Spring 2025

SED Lab Mentorship & Professional Development Program
The SED Lab Mentorship & Professional Development Program is designed to enhance mentorship within the lab while preparing students to contribute to the broader research community at the University of Toronto. The program will equip graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff with essential leadership and supervision skills through structured training, professional development workshops, and peer support. By fostering a collaborative and supportive environment, this initiative strengthens research training and professional growth, ensuring that trainees thrive within and beyond the lab. 

Mobilizing Quality Improvement Opportunities in Research Teams through Microlearning
Integration of quality improvement (QI) training and consistent reinforcement of QI knowledge, skills, and attitude throughout graduate school experience is crucial to nurturing a continuous quality improvement mindset for students’ subsequent career development and advancement. This initiative aims to create a series of asynchronous bite-sized educational modules (i.e., microlearning) that graduate students can easily access in order to learn at their own pace. The modules focus on how to define a QI initiative and then how to plan and conduct a QI project that could be executed within a single lab, a research team, or across multiple teams.

Graduate Department of Art History – Kitchen Table Conversation Series
As a global and transhistorical discipline, art history benefits from team collaboration in various forms: from the development of research questions and the honing of writing practices to the reimagining of pedagogical strategies and the establishment of scholarly values. However, because art history is defined by subfields (time period, geographic area, medium, and methodology), such collaborations are often disincentivized. Indeed, the most common structures that encourage academic collaboration–working groups, symposia, or lecture series–often serve to further entrench these sub-disciplinary divisions.  

As we seek to encourage group collaboration within the Art History department, graduate students and the EDI committee are building a Kitchen Table Conversation Series. This series will provide a consistent interdisciplinary space where faculty, staff, fellows, and invited specialists can collaborate and converse on equal footing around shared issues, creative research strategies, and dissemination methods. The goal of this non-hierarchical format is to foster a departmental culture that is inclusive and equitable and that can harness a diversity of personal experiences, viewpoints, and methodological approaches within our discipline and the wider art world. This initiative will thus promote awareness of the potential for collaborative research teams, provide ongoing professional development (via practical and intellectual conversations with working professionals), and support student well-being by holding space for candid conversation and the more personal, emotional side of our work and its challenges. 

Department of Biological Sciences Graduate Student Seminar Series 
The Department of Biological Sciences at UTSC is planning to re-establish a Graduate Student Seminar Series. We believe that solutions to great challenges often blossom in places where everyone is both relaxed and excited about great science. This seminar series offers an opportunity for students from diverse scientific and cultural backgrounds to come together. Our seminar series will provide graduate students and postdocs with the opportunity to share their research findings with others in the department. These presentations will not only showcase their work but will also foster group collaborations between the trainees and other labs or teams in our department. The seminar series also encourages trainees to ask questions in an informal setting, helping them develop this skill and build self-confidence. Bringing students and faculty together and discussing great science will create a collegial atmosphere for multidisciplinary research team collaborations to develop. 

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