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Provost's Faculty Travel Fund Program

The Provost's Faculty Travel Fund is a source of support for faculty travel when presenting peer-reviewed work at important professional meetings.

The fund was established by the provost in the spring of 2008 to provide a vehicle to strengthen research and creative programs while enhancing the university's national and international presence in the scholarly community.

PURPOSE

The Provost’s Faculty Travel Fund is designed to help the University of Houston's tenured and tenure-track faculty members enhance their professional development and increase the visibility of the institution by supporting faculty travel to present the results of their research or creative
activity at meetings with a national or international audience.

NATURE OF SUPPORT

  • The maximum amount of each individual award will be set at $1200.00. There is not an exception to this amount for foreign travel. Only the most economical fares are eligible for reimbursement under this program.
  • Eligible travel expenses include registration fees, airfare, ground transportation, lodging, and meals.
  • The fund is not intended to replace support for faculty travel from existing sources (e.g., contracts and grants, and current policies or practices for travel support within colleges or departments). If those sources have been utilized for an earlier presentation, the committee will entertain a request for funds in support of an additional presentation. The intent is to increase the number of times that UH faculty members appear on the programs at national and international peer-reviewed meetings.

QUALIFYING VENUES

  • An award may be allocated only if the faculty member is presenting his or her research or creative work at a qualifying venue; and only if there is a peer-review process such that the presentation might have been rejected.
  • Qualifying venues include regular or annual meetings of a national (US or another country's national society) or international professional society; or quadrennial (or otherwise periodically occurring) international congresses that are sponsored by a number of national professional societies. Professional societies are usually defined as those that collect dues, have elected officers, and may have published journals or other outlets for scholarly work. Qualifying venues may also include meetings sponsored by a government agency or industrial society if the meetings are of an academic nature and take place annually or biennially; and juried competitions of a national or international scope that are held regularly.
  • Funds are not to be allocated to attend special meetings, Festschrifts, meetings of special interest groups, etc. Funds will not be allocated for travel to participate as a panelist, session chair, or proposal reviewer.
  • The fund is not intended to provide support for a presentation at another university, a museum, or comparable institution, even if by invitation.
  • The requirement that candidates present peer-reviewed work at a venue described above may be modified to take into account of the nature of a faculty member’s discipline. For example, for those faculty in the performing arts such as the visual arts, music, dance, and theater, the applicant must demonstrate that he or she has been invited to deliver a show or performance at a prestigious venue that will bring national or international attention to the excellence of performing arts at the University of Houston.

APPLICANT ELIGIBILITY

  • Only tenured and tenure-track faculty members are eligible to receive funding from this program. Retired faculty members and those on Voluntary Modification of Employment (VMOE) are not eligible.
  • For presentation of collaborative research which involve multiple faculty, only the presenting faculty member may be supported. In special cases (e.g., duet performances), this limitation may be waived upon recommendation of the appropriate dean, contingent upon available funding.
  • If travel has already occurred at the time of application, then faculty who received reimbursement from any other sources for that travel are not eligible to apply for this fund.
  • A faculty member may receive at most one travel award from this program per fiscal year.

APPLICATION PROCESS AND DEADLINES

  • A copy of these guidelines and the application form for the Provost’s Faculty Travel Fund Program are available for download at: http://www.uh.edu/provost/fac/faculty-grants/
  • Applications must be approved by the appropriate department chair and dean, and will be reviewed for final approval by a faculty committee. Deans have been directed to approve such requests only if they meet the above guidelines, including the requirement that this fund is not being used as a substitute for (or supplement to) other sources of funding. Applicants must download the application, complete it electronically, print a hardcopy, and obtain the appropriate signatures from their department chair and dean.
  • Signed application forms and supporting documentation should be submitted by deans prior to the application deadline to Olga Selley at oselley [at] uh.edu (oselley[at]uh[dot]edu). Only electronic copies will be accepted.
  • There are three deadlines per year (one each for fall, spring, summer semester travel) in order to help ensure that funds will be available to faculty in those disciplines whose meetings are later in the academic calendar. The available funds will be distributed between the two parts of the year. Faculty may submit applications on a rolling basis for funding of travel that has already occurred or will occur.
  • For the 2014-2015 fiscal year of the program, application deadlines will be as follows:
    - Friday, October 3, 2014 by 5 p.m. for travel between September 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015.
    - Friday, January 30, 2015 by 5 p.m. for travel between March 1 and May 31, 2015.
    - Friday, May 8, 2015 by 5p.m. for travel between June 1 and August 31, 2015.

DECISION PROCESS

  • A faculty committee appointed by the Provost will review requests for support to ensure conformance to the guidelines and normally will approve those that do conform, subject to availability of funds. Note that the committee will not be reviewing the papers or posters themselves; the peer-review process of the appropriate meetings and the approval processes within the colleges are assumed to have done that work. In case there are more qualifying requests than available funds, the committee will utilize more stringent criteria, including such factors as how recently such support has been provided; it may also fund them in the order received—again noting that a sub-set of the funds will be ear-marked for the second half of the year.
  • Upon approval, funds will be provided to the college and the department will be responsible for the paperwork associated with reimbursement.
  • Once an application has been approved, no substitutions will be allowed; if an individual wishes to use the program’s funds to support a presentation other than the one for which the original application was submitted, he or she must submit an entirely new application prior to the application deadline.