Our Research Incubator program offers hands-on support for research projects using existing data to accelerate depression research activity of early-career faculty and emerging scholars across the University of Michigan. 

The application window for our next cohort will be announced in May 2025. 

Supporting early-career investigators

Early-career investigators have many creative research questions that have the potential to advance the field of depression research substantially. Yet, there are often hurdles in developing an impactful research program—including understanding resources, limited funding or protected research time, and lack of a research team. Our Research Incubator program leverages existing dataset resources to address these gaps so investigators can make high-impact research advances more quickly and efficiently. 

Learn more about the benefits of using existing data in research. 

The program offers statistical support, project management and faculty expertise for research ideas from early-career faculty and emerging scholars from all disciplinary backgrounds. Our Core team collaborates with participants to refine their research idea and leads all research tasks for the project. Support includes identifying relevant data sources, all data management and analysis, interpretation of results, and collaboratively partnering to disseminate findings.

Program Details

Who should apply

Our goal is to accelerate impactful research advances and build a robust, interdisciplinary research workforce. This program is particularly valuable for investigators who:

  • Have experienced barriers in seeing their research ideas through to completion
  • Are new to mental health research
  • Have limited experience working with secondary data
  • Have limited statistical capacity
  • Don’t have a dedicated research team 
  • Have short-term projects that are smaller in scope that can be completed in less than one year

Questions

 Visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for program details or email our team for additional questions.

What to expect during the program

Learn more

Meet our past cohorts

Learn more