Call for proposals open for the 2020 Women in STEM awards

The call is open for women faculty in UNM’s STEM fields to apply for a variety of grants as part of the 2020 Women In STEM awards. New this year, research assistant and associate faculty are eligible to submit proposals as well as other STEM faculty members.

Awards range from $3,000 to $15,000 and three types of grants will be awarded through the program. They include travel awards to foster collaborations, seed awards to stimulate research projects that will lead to additional external funding, and workshop awards, which are designed to generate innovative research ideas and collaborations.

“The committee always enjoys the wide range of ideas in the proposals, and we look forward to a great diversity in submissions this year. Past winners of these awards are having some big successes, including major funding and high impact publications. We’re excited to be able to help another group of outstanding faculty this year,“ said Julia Fulghum, director of Advance at UNM, a National Science Foundation-funded project that recruits, retains and promotes women and minority faculty in STEM fields.

The awards are supported by an anonymous gift made in 2015 to UNM to support research by and professorships for women faculty in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The income from the investment on this gift will be used to help UNM women assistant and associate STEM professors to establish new lines of research and to develop research collaborations. 

UNM Provost James Holloway said he’s excited that the awards foster the ongoing success of women scientists.

“I’m thrilled that UNM is able to offer these awards owing to the generous support of an anonymous donor.  Our very accomplished women faculty have contributed greatly to the success of UNM and our students, and these awards will help ensure this continued impact,” Holloway said.

Unlike past years, research assistant and associate faculty are eligible to apply for the awards. Other eligible applicants include tenure-track and tenured women faculty members at UNM who hold the rank of assistant or associate professor and who are pursuing research in areas supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (non-clinical) or the Department Of Energy.

The call is being released earlier than in past years to encourage more women to apply. Proposals are due April 20. Decisions will be announced by June 5, 2020. See the details of the call here.

Since 2016, 31 women in a variety of STEM fields across UNM have been named as recipients of the award.

Dr. Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who was a recipient in 2018 said the award and the related publicity was important to her research on resource allocation process in cyber-physical social systems.

“Advance at UNM provided critical initial seed funding which I used to produce preliminary research results, and these results helped greatly in the acquisition of subsequent external funding,” she said.

“The publicity that I received was instrumental in establishing outreach activities with Sandia National Laboratories,” she said.

Read more about other past winners here.