NSF Faculty Travel Grant

Announcing a new NSF-funded travel grant program

Enabling Faculty at Under-Resourced Primarily Undergraduate Institutions to Attend the 2024 Fall American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual Meeting (Award #2422805)

About

This award will initiate a Travel Grant program for faculty from typically under-resourced institutions, such as Emerging Research Institutions (ERIs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and community colleges (2YCs). Faculty at these institutions often have higher teaching loads and do not have access to significant travel funds, making it more difficult for them to attend scientific conferences. Attendance at conferences allows faculty to establish connections to other researchers and bring back the latest innovations in research and teaching to their classrooms.

The AGU's Annual Meeting is a large gathering of geoscience professionals, with >22,000 attendees from 100+ countries. This award will initiate a Travel Grant program for up to 50 early-to-mid career faculty from under-resourced institutions to attend the 2024 Fall AGU meeting. In addition to a travel stipend, the travel grant awardees will have the opportunity to participate in a professional development workshop, networking and social events, co-chair sessions at the conference, and review student presentations. There will be pre- and post-event evaluation surveys and one or more journal articles will result from the award. 

Who is eligible to apply?

• Are you an early- to mid-career geoscience faculty member?
• Do you work at a two-year college (2YC) or four-year college/university (4YC)?
• Are you interested in attending the 2024 American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual conference in Washington DC?
• Do you need financial assistance to cover travel expenses in order to attend this conference? 

If your answers are ‘yes’ please consider applying for this travel grant through our NSF-funded pilot project!

Goals

The goal of this pilot project is to create the foundation for a longer-term sustainable program to broaden participation in the AGU annual conference, and better support a more institutionally-diverse, networked, professional geoscience community. Our primary objective is to offer $1700 travel stipends to support 50 early-to-mid-career geoscience faculty at under-resourced U.S. 2- and 4-year colleges and universities (including ERIs, MSIs and 2YCs) to attend the 2024 AGU annual conference.

In conjunction with the travel support, we will use this disciplinary society annual conference as a platform for leadership, professional development, and capacity-building activities for the cohort participants. This approach is intended to build both individual capacity and community capacity.

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Questions?

Please contact Kristen St John (stjohnke@jmu.edu),

Kusali Gamage (kgamage@austincc.edu), 

or Billy Williams (bwilliams@agu.org).