SEED is a project funded by the French National Research Agence ANR. The project is led by Jürgen Steinacker who was awarded a senior Chaire d'Excellence position at the hosting Institute for planetary and astrophysical sciences IPAG in Grenoble.

The scientific goal of the project is to explore the growth of dust grains in molecular cloud cores before and while they collapse to form stars and later planets, in this way determining the seed population of grains for the planet formation process.