Funding Opportunities for Faculty & Staff

Fall deadline: November 1
Spring deadline: April 1

The Holtz Center is pleased to offer travel awards of up to $1500 to Holtz Center faculty and staff members presenting STS-related research at conferences.

Two cycles of awards are made annually, with a November 1 deadline and an April 1 deadline. Apply to whichever date you feel is most appropriate in relation to your intended travel date.

Note that travel award funds are provided in the form of a reimbursement after the awardee completes their conference-related travel.

To apply, please send an abstract of the paper to be presented, estimated budget (travel, lodging, and conference fees), a list of other potential funding sources and a CV to Sainath Suryanarayanan.

While evidence of acceptance to a conference is not required at the time of application submission it will be required by the time of the e-reimbursement request process.

For any questions related to the faculty/staff travel award application process, email Associate Director Sainath Suryanarayanan: ssuryanaraya@wisc.edu

Deadline: April 1

The Holtz Center offers an annual Expanding Dialogs Fellowship for UW-Madison Faculty and Staff. The Holtz Center seeks, as one of its key missions, to promote public engagement with questions concerning the relationship of society and culture with science, medicine, and technology. As such, we offer this fellowship to a faculty or academic staff member who proposes an innovative way to engage the broader community in matters of science and technology that have general social and political importance. The fellowship provides the successful applicant with $5,000 in flexible funds.

Recent winners:

1 award in 2024-25:

Michael Wagner, “Digitally Revitalizing Local & Community Media: Exploring Pathways to Improve Civic Culture, Public Health, and & Democracy”, will convene a conference in the fall of 2024 that will focus on cutting-edge research about the nature of online and offline civic dialogs, from local to international, with substantial use of large language
models (AI) to detect and analyze digital conversations.

Two awards in 2022-23:

Reginold Royston, “Tech Futures: Ghana’s Media and Technoscape at Crossroads”, a series of panels on STS scholarship, and research on Africa and technology in international development, in Tamale, Ghana.

Reba Luiken, “Cool Plants,” explores climate change in an approachable way by exploring our botanical neighborhood during the winter.

2021-22: Nan Enstad, Collegeland Podcast: An Episode Series on Climate Change.

2020-21: Malia Jones, “Dear Pandemic” social media science communications campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and upcoming podcast and translation.

2019-20: Caroline Gottschalk Druschke. The fellowship supported collaboration between the Driftless Writing Center and her team’s project, Stories from the Flood.

2018-19: Kata Beilin, Robert Lundberg, Alexandra Lakind, Nicole Bennett, and Tom Jones. The team was funded for their Displaced Horizons multimedia and music installations.

2017-18: Jessie Conaway. The fellowship funded Conaway’s work to increase participation in STEM fields by Native American students.

2016-17: Jenell Johnson. Johnson used the funds to conduct a statewide series of public deliberations about genome editing.

2015-16: Sarah Pfatteicher & Jeffrey Russell. This fellowship funded an interdisciplinary conference on ethical behavior the reached both campus and non-campus audiences.

2014-15: Lynda Barry. Barry used using the fellowship to create and publish “Graphic Writing Inside Out: A Workbook” (GWIO) and to disseminate new methods for understanding and representing scientific expertise through a series of public workshops.

2013-14: Catherine Arnott Smith. Smith used the fellowship to fund a series of public forums across Wisconsin on privacy and electronic medical records.

This program is currently closed. In the past, this funding mechanism was used to support a number of initiatives. For examples, see here. Watch this space for future opportunities.