Finding Grant Opportunities

The ASU Grants Office receives numerous newsletters, emails, and other notifications of new grant opportunities from federal, state and private sources. From those, the office is able to determine which opportunities would be the best fit for our university, colleges, departments, faculty, staff and students. Much of the guesswork is taken out of the process. It’s very important then, to let your Grants Office know what your research and scholarship interests are so that the office can better identify opportunities for you. For those of you who would like to search for grant opportunities on your own and even set up alert profiles or expertise services, we have two databases available for use on campus. We have IRIS and GrantSelect. Below is a brief introduction to both.

The IRIS Database currently contains over 9,000 active federal and private funding opportunities in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition to funding opportunities for faculty, the IRIS Database also contains fellowships and scholarships for grad students and undergrads. Users can search IRIS by sponsor, deadline date, keyword, and other criteria. Most IRIS records contain live links to sponsor Web sites, electronic forms, or Electronic Research Administration (eRA) portals. The IRIS Database is updated daily.

The IRIS Alert Service enables students, staff, and researchers at subscribing institutions to create their own IRIS search profiles. Users can select their preferred search frequency, delivery method (e-mail or Web), and keywords. The program runs the user's profile against the IRIS database and delivers the search results automatically via e-mail or the Web.

The IRIS Expertise Service enables researchers at subscribing institutions to create detailed electronic CVs ("biosketches") and post them to a Web-accessible database for viewing by colleagues at other institutions, program officers at federal and private funding agencies, and private companies. The biosketches can also be used in the electronic submission of grant proposals.There are no copyright or ownership restrictions on IRIS Expertise Service biosketches. Subscribing institutions can download their faculty members' biosketches at any time and use them to populate a local database—or even another online service.

How do you access it? As long as you are using an ASU campus computer you will be able to access the site. http://www.library.uiuc.edu/iris/  If you need additional assistance, there is also an IRIS short course located at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/iris/short_course.html 

GrantSelect is an extensive online grants database compiled and edited by Schoolhouse Partners, and it contains more than 12,900 funding opportunities provided by more than 5,800 unique sponsoring organizations. GrantSelect also provides an email alert service that can be set up at the site. This database is easy to use and easy to access from any ASU campus computer at: http://grantselect.com/gs/cgi-bin/welcome.pl

If you should need additional information or assistance with either of these tools, please feel free to contact the Kim in the Grants Office at x2327 or kgray@aug.edu .

Foundation Directory Online

Foundation Directory Online is the nation's leading online funding research tool, developed by the Foundation Center, a national nonprofit service organization founded over 50 years ago to help open U.S. foundations to public view. Over the past halfcentury the Foundation Center has evolved from one small library into philanthropy's information hub. This site is a password protected directory of public and private foundation grant opportunities. Please come to the Grants Office if you would like to peruse the database.