Overview

Since 2016, MIDAS has been offering Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) grants to U-M faculty to enable groundbreaking disciplinary and interdisciplinary research through data science and AI, making it possible for research teams to form many new collaborations, formulate groundbreaking ideas, and secure external funding to expand their work. As of 2022, a total of $12M MIDAS funding has jump-started 63 research projects, which expanded into 112 follow-on projects with $114M of external funding. In addition, “year after year, the applicants propose to employ increasingly more sophisticated data science and AI methods to address increasingly more profound research questions,” says Dr. H. V. Jagadish, Director of MIDAS. “This reflects the rapid advancement of data science and AI and their transformation of science and society, and U-M researchers are at the forefront of it.