The Society of Systematic Biologists is pleased to announce the availability of awards for revisionary taxonomy and systematics, modeled after the NSF Dear Colleague Letter: Advancing Revisionary Taxonomy and Systematics (ARTS) recently developed within the Systematics and Biodiversity Science Cluster. We are calling these ‘mini-ARTS’ grants. These awards are designed to allow SSB members (students, post-docs, and faculty) to spend a summer or semester apprenticed to an expert in a particular taxonomic group or to enhance revisionary taxonomic and systematics research in novel ways. Goals of this award program are to address constraints on our knowledge of undescribed biodiversity, assist in passing on taxonomic expertise before it is lost, increase the number of students with broad training in organismal biology and systematics, and support projects in biodiversity and taxonomy informatics as well as monographic and revisionary taxonomy. Activities can include a trip to the taxonomist’s laboratory, pay for the taxonomist to visit the applicant’s laboratory for a period of time, or pay for costs of computer time or development of interactive keys for electronic dissemination of systematics results. Requests for support may be in any amount up to $3,000. We will fund two or three of these awards this year.
Please visit NSF’s website http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11037/nsf11037.jsp for more information about their ARTS program.
How to apply (deadline March 31, 2012)
A complete application includes 1) a brief description of the project, including a separate section justifying the importance of the taxon and the revisionary work, 2) an itemized budget, 3) the applicant’s CV, and 4) a letter of support from the taxonomic expert or collaborator. If the applicant is a student or post-doc, please also include a reference letter from the advisor. Applicants may be from any country, but must be members of SSB, and are advised to join the Society as soon as possible to facilitate their applications (to join go to: http://systbio.org/?q=node/6). The narrative part of the application should be no more than two pages, including the budget, but not including the curriculum vitae and letter(s).
Grant applications should be sent to the SSB Awards Committee ( ssb-apps@life.illinois.edu), Committee Chair Sydney Cameron. E-mail submissions are required, and applicants should use pdf format for all documents. In the subject line of the email, please indicate the SSB award category as ‘mini-ARTS’.
Please see the SSB website (http://systbio.org/?q=node/26) for any updates or additional information about this award. Questions via email may be addressed to Rhiannon Peery (ssb-apps@life.illinois.edu).
APPLICATION DEADLINE IS MARCH 31, 2012
Rhiannon Peery
PhD Candidate in the lab of Stephen Downie
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department of Plant Biology
265 Morrill Hall
505 S Goodwin Ave
Urbana, IL 61801-3707