CELSS Grants for Graduate Students’ Experimental Projects
The Columbia Experimental Laboratory in the Social Sciences (CELSS) provides funding to support promising experimental projects by graduate students who intend to use the lab.
Note: Unless part of a class, any experiment at CELSS requires approval by the Institutional Review Board (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irb/) and the respect of the rules of use for the laboratory (http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/celss/rules/). Failure to comply with IRB and CELSS rules will result in the withdrawal of the grant.
Application
The deadline for Fall 2017 applications is December 1st, 2017.
Later applications may be considered on a rolling basis, depending on funds’ availability.
The application must include: (1) the proposal; (2) the budget; (3) the applicant’s cv; (4) the endorsement of a faculty advisor. Applications will be evaluated competitively by a committee of referees.
The proposal should outline briefly the basic rationale of the research, the question under study, the relevance of an experiment to the project, and the experimental procedures. Its maximum length is 1,500 words, excluding bibliography. Please note that longer proposals will not be considered.
The maximum budget is $1,000. However, if the application concerns a brand new experimental project, it is strongly recommended to apply for a seed grant of $500 or less for running a pilot experiment. Upon successful completion of the pilot, a summary of preliminary results and a new budget can be submitted requesting an additional $500. The bulk of the budget should be payments to experimental subjects, in line with the guidelines in Orsee. Additional miscellaneous expenses linked to the experiment, such as printing, can be included. Exceptions to the $1,000 limit can be requested but must be strongly motivated and have low probability of acceptance. The committee retains the discretion to allocate fewer funds than requested. Note: The funding allocation expires at the end of the second semester following the grant (here: June 2018). Unused funds will be reappropriated by CELSS.
The endorsement of a faculty advisor can be a short email to the CELSS director (celss-director@columbia.edu). The advisor needs to state that he/she will be responsible for following the progress of the project.
The applicant should submit the items mentioned above in electronic form in a single compressed folder, and send the application to the CELSS manager, at celss-manager@columbia.edu. The title of the e-mail should be “Application for CELSS Funding” and the name of the compressed file should be “LastnameFirstname_CelssFundingApp”.
Eligibility
Applicants must be advanced doctoral students at Columbia in Economics, Political Science, SIPA, the Business School, or in a department affiliated with ISERP.
Requests for clarification
Questions concerning this call for proposal and the use of the lab can be addressed to the CELSS manager, at celss-manager@columbia.edu, or to the CELSS director at celss-director@columbia.edu.