Office of Research Development

Empowering research, scholarship, and artistry through expert guidance and dedicated support. 

The Office of Research Development (ORD) at NIU supports research, scholarship, and creative activity by providing resources and expertise to help identify funding opportunities, develop competitive proposals, and build strategic collaborations in the pursuit of external funding.

Specifically, ORD supports the NIU community via the following:

• Campus collaboration to find funding opportunities: ORD collaborates with our partners in the Office of Innovation and Corporate and Foundation Relations to find, develop, and nurture opportunities that lead to diverse funding for the university research portfolio via the NIU Huskie Frontiers Team (HFT) and individual pursuits.
• Internal competitions for limited submission funding opportunities: External grant sponsors sometimes place a cap on the number of proposals an applicant institution can submit. ORD coordinates an internal process to select the proposals that will be submitted from NIU to the sponsor in these cases. Current limited submission internal competitions can be found on ORD’s InfoReady site.
• Internal funding opportunities: Internal grants provide faculty and staff with institutional funding to support research, scholarship, creative activity, and project development. These programs help investigators generate preliminary data, advance innovative ideas, and strengthen their competitiveness for extramural funding opportunities.
• The University Grants Academy (UGA) is a semester-long program that helps faculty develop competitive grant proposals and increase their success in securing external funding. Participants complete a proposal for submission during or within six months of completing the program.
• Support for Finding Funding, NIU offers subscription-based databases and other tools to search for funding sources.
• Dependent Care Professional Travel Fund Program: Internal grant to defray incremental, out-of-pocket expenses incurred for dependent care while traveling for work activities.