What is the GRIN award?

Since 2011, the JFSP, in partnership with the Association for Fire Ecology, has invited current master and doctoral students enrolled at colleges or universities within the United States in the fields of wildland fire and related physical, biological, and social sciences to compete for a Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) award, which provides one-time funds up to $25,000 through a university, tribal government, nongovernmental organization, or federal agency. These awards allow students to conduct research that will supplement and enhance the quality, scope, or applicability of their thesis or dissertation and to build skills needed for independent inquiry.

The purpose of a GRIN award is to enhance student exposure to the management and policy relevance of their research to achieve beneficial outcomes of funded work. These awards:

• Enhance student exposure to and interaction with fire and fuel managers.
• Develop appreciation and understanding of fire and fuel managers’ information and research needs.
• Augment already planned and funded master or doctoral research to develop information and/or products useful to managers.

Proposals for GRIN awards must demonstrate relevance to fire, fuel, natural resource, or land management and include a means to directly communicate with managers, when applicable, regarding project outcomes. Proposals must describe new, unfunded work that extends ongoing or planned research that is the subject of a thesis or dissertation and has been approved by the student’s advisory committee. Succinct proposals, authored by the student and reviewed and submitted by the student’s advisor who acts as the project’s formal principal investigator, must be directly related to the mission and goals of the JFSP to be considered.

GRIN proposals should address questions associated with one or more of the following topic areas:

• Fuels management and fire behavior
• Emissions and air quality
• Fire effects and post-fire recovery
• Relative impacts of prescribed fire versus wildfire
• Human dimensions of fire

All applicants receive detailed and supportive feedback on their proposals. Proposals are evaluated on scientific merit, the applicant’s credentials, extent to which the proposed work extends or enhances an approved thesis or dissertation, and relevance of the research to the JFSP’s goals. In securing letters of support from fire management practitioners, students learn the importance of their science being applicable to real-world questions and of strategic planning to communicate and disseminate the knowledge they hoped to gain. In this way, the GRIN proposal process prepares future fire scientists to conduct high-quality research with a clear pathway for that research making a difference in wildland fire management.