Dear Investigators,

Once again, congratulations on a successful Letter of Intent and travel award as part of the Multi-Investigator Seed Grant RFA sponsored by the Office of Academic Integration.  As you will recall, the rationale for the Letter of Intent stage that triggered the travel award was to select the proposals that seemed to have the highest likelihood of success and to give the investigators time and the resources to travel between campuses to hone their full research proposals.  While we are aware that some of you have already taken advantage of the travel funds, we are also aware that many of you had planned March and April travel, closer to the original April 30 deadline for full proposals. 

Given the disruption due to travel and gathering restrictions imposed because of COVID-19 risks, we recognize that it is not now possible for groups from New York City and Ithaca to congregate and discuss plans for their full proposals.  We also appreciate that many of you may have to curtail work on the project you have envisioned due to other obligations or restrictions in this difficult time.  Accordingly, we will extend both the deadline for use of travel awards and for the full proposal. Meanwhile, we do encourage you to make use of ZOOM technology to continue to interact with your partners on the other campus.  Instructions for ZOOM conferencing can be found here:

Ithaca/Cornell Tech Campus: https://it.cornell.edu/zoom
Weill Cornell: https://its.weill.cornell.edu/services/online-collaboration/zoom

We will establish a new proposal deadline and end date for use of the travel funds once it is clearer when investigative work and intercampus interactions can be normalized.  So, please share this update with your investigative team and look out for another announcement in days to come.

Meanwhile, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Office of Academic Integration at ovpai@cornell.edu.

We wish you all well and please stay safe.

Gary Koretzky
Vice Provost for Academic Integration