WelchX Retreat
WelchX Retreat and Pilot Grants
| Applications Open | Application Deadline | Participants Announced |
| February 1 | February 28 | April 1 |
Pilot Grants
| Application Portal Opens | Application Deadline | Award Announced |
| June 20 | July 3 | August |
Welch eXperimental (WelchX) Collaboration Retreats
This program aims to bring together Texas researchers to topically focused chemistry meetings and stimulate them to ideate on challenging issues of our time. Early-to mid-career tenured faculty will be invited to this fully in-person summer meeting to stimulate collaborations that foster lasting connections among the participants, thus increasing the density of research ties across Texas and spurring the growth of basic research in the chemical sciences.
The 2025 retreat will take place Monday, June 16 - Thursday, June 19 at The Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston in Houston.
The theme for the WelchX 2025 collaboration retreat is “Chemical Research for Grand Challenges”
The retreat’s activities are designed to spur creative, innovative, collaborative ideas that address the most challenging and unexplored issues in climate-smart chemistry, clean energy, materials production and usage, minerals processing and clean water.
Topics within this theme could include, but are not limited to:
- Climate-Smart Chemistry (e.g., nanostructured material catalysts, energy conversion, sustainable plastics production/upcycling, novel ways to make H2)
- Energy Capture and Storage (e.g., batteries, hierarchical organic molecules, perovskites and quantum dots, plasmonic materials, decarbonization)
- Organic Semiconductors (e.g., solar cells, sensors, novel applications)
- Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Materials (e.g., computational sciences to design and predict the properties of new materials)
- Critical Minerals Processing (e.g., E-waste processing, or low-abundance sources)
- Clean Water (e.g., contaminant detection and elimination, advanced filtration)
Participation in WelchX is by invitation only. To participate, you must first apply and be selected by the WelchX organizing committee. WelchX retreat participants are eligible to develop the collaborative concepts they design at the retreat into funding proposals to be considered for WelchX collaborative Pilot Grants of up to $100,000 for 12 months.
Retreat applications accepted February 1, 2025 - February 28, 2025.