The UIF was established by President Richard L. McCormick in 1996 to allow the University to invest in transformative, cutting-edge initiatives through internal reallocation. A 1-percent assessment on all UW operating budgets has supported the UIF each biennium.

The climate change project is a collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences. It will create an interdisciplinary program in climate change and the global CO2 cycle that will both integrate existing strengths and fill some gaps, Murray said.

“What we plan to do is to set up an interdisciplinary curriculum that graduate students from all these different fields can take,” Murray said. “The UW has many strengths in this field, but our efforts up to now have been uncoordinated, so we haven’t had the impact nationally that we should have. With this grant we’ll be able to do that.”

He said that, among other things, the grant will help bring in some new faculty who have expertise in the deficient areas.

Participating units in the entrepreneurship center are the Business School and the College of Engineering. The center will be home to a New Venture Creation Lab where faculty and students from diverse disciplines will examine the market potential of emerging technologies developed by the UW. Selected technologies from the University’s intellectual property will become the “laboratory” for student instruction and faculty research on high-tech entrepreneurship.

Executive director Song’s vision is to create the leading national research center for developing and disseminating knowledge on technology entrepreneurship. “Our center will provide a laboratory for faculty research and student learning to understand how entrepreneurs develop, lead and transform today’s most exciting high-tech companies,” said Song, who has directed the Business School’s Program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation for the past year. “This is the first time that any university in the United States - or the world - has combined access to leading-edge technology with a multi-disciplinary approach to research and teaching entrepreneurship.”

The Center for Digital Arts involves Art, Music, Computer Science and Engineering, Architecture, Electrical Engineering and Drama. The initiative will create a new program whose courses will be open to both undergraduate and graduate students - either as supplements to a traditional program or as a digital arts major. The funding provides for the hiring of new faculty and the construction of digital studios set up to support both advanced technology research and the creation of new works of art.

“What we plan to do is to have technologists and artists working in tandem to create and discover new knowledge in both fields, as well as develop new genres of art that could only be created using digital technology,” Karpen said. “The Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CARTAH) and the Animation Research Labs (ARL) are two existing digital arts-related units that will be integral to the Digital Arts Program as it develops.”

Karpen said the program will be unusual in the arts in that it will offer a doctorate on the fine arts side of things, something not usually found. For example, an art student today can get a doctorate in art history but not in studio art. The advanced student in digital arts will be actively creating new art along with a wide range of research.

The Program on Values in Society is a collaboration of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Evans School of Public Affairs,the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health, the Information School, the Business School, the Graduate School and Undergraduate Education. It will be essentially a minor for undergraduates and a certificate program for grad students in the field of applied ethics.

According to Roberts, four new faculty will be hired. Two will be in joint positions - one between philosophy and public affairs and the other between philosophy and medical history and ethics in the School of Medicine. Two will be in the Philosophy Department specializing in medical ethics and environmental ethics.

“What we’re trying to do is to bring abstract moral and political thinking to bear on the nitty gritty of specific, complex ethical problems,” Roberts said. “We’ve formed an advisory board of current UW faculty from the participating units to consult on the hiring of the new faculty and on the designing of the programs.”

The Web-enabled financial desktop, under the direction of Computing and Communications (C&C), the Executive Vice President and Planning and Budgeting, will be an integrated, Web-based tool set providing a single place where faculty and staff have access to “all things financial” that are necessary for them to perform their jobs.

“The University’s financial systems are antiquated,” said Charles Bennett, assistant controller. “They’re good at number crunching, but entering and retrieving data is challenging. This will make the system a lot more flexible and easy to use.”

Bennett explained that although C&C has created a rough prototype, the new system has not been designed yet because the first step in the process is to talk to users and find out what they need. He said that the process that created the USER system will serve as a model.

The UIF projects will receive a total of $2.7 million for the biennium.

A review of the UIF this spring produced a recommendation, accepted by the President, that the funding source for the projects be transferred gradually from unit operating budgets to other sources of funding, including but not limited to private donations, endowment funding, state funds and tuition.