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Call for Small Grant Proposals:
The TDLC Trainee Committee will award small grants for research or related activities in keeping with the initiatives of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. Applicants may request funds for new research or an ongoing project in the Center. Proposals for a workshop or travel grant are also welcome. The amount of funds available for each trainee grant is $2,500.
Submission Guidelines:
All TDLC trainees (undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows) are invited to apply. All proposals must conform to the format provided in the proposal template. Workshop Proposals should contain the agenda for the workshop or invited speaker and a statement of impact for the TDLC.
Click here for a Small Grant Proposal Template.
Additionally, all proposals require the following:
- Statement of relevance to at least one initiative of the TDLC (if the proposal activities are related to a specific project in the SIP, please specify the project number)
- List of people involved and their network affiliations
- Budget (we expect that most proposals will be for amounts of $2,500 or less)
- In cases where a project is supported by multiple funding sources, applicants should clarify how the requested funds will be used in conjunction with other resources
- Proposals should be one page or less
Allowable CostsWe can provide funds for many research activities including lab and computer supplies, travel to other TDLC sites to collaborate with other trainees, workshops, and travel to a scientific conference to present results. However, since these awards come from the National Science Foundation there are certain cost categories that we cannot provide funds for such as: membership to a professional society, entertainment and alcohol, and international travel (except to Canada & Mexico). Additionally, we will not fund human subject payments and salary/stipend. All expenditures must conform to NSF and your own institutional regulations (including the Fly America Act for travel). If you are unsure if the expenditure you propose is allowable, please email Christopher Kanan (
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).
Proposal Deadline: December 1, 2009
Send proposals to
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Successful Proposals
Last year, the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center funded 9 projects by graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. Here are some of the highlights:
"The TDLC trainee research grant allowed me to assess the feasibility of extending my studies of eye-movement search in primates to freely-moving rodents searching for food. Both tasks involve a search for a hidden target that yields a reward. Target locations vary from trial to trial, but in a manner that describes an underlying distribution. Primates search in manner that suggests that they have implicitly learned the hidden target distribution. One goal is to observe how a rat foraging for hidden food targets given the same task constraints. Do the models that describe the primate behavior also fit the rodent behavior? This preliminary data from two pilot animals lead to a follow-on proposal in which we requested funds to build an automated arena for natural exploration tasks such as this. The next goal is to induce multiple learning transitions during a session so we could examine neuronal activity that correlates with that learning." -- Leanne Chukoskie
"I used the award to travel to Jim Tanaka's 'Face Camp' at the University of Victoria this summer, an event where kids come in for a day of playing and learning about faces. The kids spend one of 6 hours involved in experiments. I helped run two of the three camps and was in charge of managing the volunteers who were helping with data collection. I also helped run some of the other camp activities when the experiments were finished. It was a phenomenal experience. We got an entire developmental study on face perception completed in two weekends (something like 110 kids) and I got a chance to see how Face Camp is a great way to merge educational outreach and good science." -- Suzy Scherf
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Opportunities 
