Research Priorities

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Your gift can provide a life-changing experience for student researchers, help move early inventions and innovations along so they can be used for the public good, or aid our eminent researchers in collecting data that not only help answer the most pressing societal questions but also make our faculty more competitive for large-scale grants. Kent State is focusing on these key research priorities:

• Undergraduate Student Research – Students who have access to high-impact research experiences during their undergraduate studies are more likely to graduate. In fact, more than 50 percent of students who participate in undergraduate research go on to graduate or professional school, thus improving their long-range earnings potential in a variety of rewarding careers.
  • Summer Undergraduate Research Experience - The Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program is a great opportunity for undergraduate researchers to work one-on-one with faculty mentors during the summer months.
  • Sophomore Research Experience – The Sophomore Research Experience enables students from lower income backgrounds to receive work study funds (matched by the Office of Student Research) so that they can earn money while working in a lab/studio.
  • Undergraduate Symposium on Research, Scholarships and Creative Endeavors – Since 2014, hundreds of undergraduate student researchers have presented their work annually – 443 in 2019 – and competed for symposium prizes. Private support allows Kent State to host this annual symposium, an event that has proven beneficial to further setting numerous participants on their chosen career paths.
• Launch New Faculty Discoveries – Whether the great ideas and innovative solutions of tomorrow are born in a lab on one of our campuses, or are developed through one of our many partnerships with business, industry, community or other academic institutions, Kent State is making substantive contributions and major breakthroughs across myriad avenues of innovation and scholarly pursuit. Your gift to support preliminary research studies will not only speed these discoveries, but faculty use preliminary data to compete for large-scale grants, so your dollars will lead to higher federal funding.
  
  At KSU we have experts conducting research on virtually every topic from better understanding and treating mental health and physical diseases to how better to educate the leaders of tomorrow. If you have a specific area of interest you’d like to support, we are happy to connect your philanthropy with our researchers. Please contact Dave Grober (dgrober@kent.edu or 330-672-5297) to discuss specific research areas of interest.
• Faculty Innovations - KSU researchers are at the forefront of developing life-changing innovations. The greatest barrier to helping these innovations move to market where they can impact public good is the lack of funds needed to generate prototypes and perform proof-of-concept studies that validate the new technology. Your gift will enable our inventors to more quickly convert ideas to commercial products.

Make a Gift to Support Research