Houghton Fund
grants for students in their third and subsequent years
of graduate study.
Students in the Atmospheric Science, Chemical Oceanography,
Physical Oceanography, and Climate Physics and Chemistry
programs, and who are in their 3rd and subsequent years of
graduate study, may apply to the Houghton Fund for a variety of
purposes. Most grants made from the Houghton Fund support
student travel to scientific meetings, but students may apply
for any support of other educational and research activities.
Requests for funding should
include an itemized budget. Please submit one copy of any
request to each member of the Committee (currently Profs.
Lindzen
[chairman],
Flierl, and
Plumb. Email is preferred (rlindzen@mit.edu,
glenn@lake.mit.edu,
rap@rossby.mit.edu) with a copy to
Mary Elliff
(54-1710,
melliff@mit.edu). All such requests must be accompanied by
a note from the student’s adviser explaining why the request is
reasonable. Requests and
faculty endorsements must be received at least one month before
any conference.
There are no hard and fast rules (with one exception, noted
below) covering applications to the Fund--the Houghton Fund
Committee will consider each case on its merits. The
following guidelines apply.
Requests for travel support
In the case of students seeking assistance with travel to
conferences and workshops, the Committee will favor requests
where the student is actually giving a talk or the equivalent
(e.g., presenting a poster). In most circumstances, the
student is expected to obtain one-half of the necessary funding
from other sources (usually the adviser's research grants), but
special cases will be considered. Normally, the Committee
will not entertain requests for more than one trip per year.
Allowable expenses include accommodation, transportation, and
meals. Car rental is not normally approved, unless there
are special reasons for requiring it. While students may
use (e.g.) government per diem rates in order to estimate likely
expenses, reimbursement will be based
on actual expenditure, not per diem rates. Experience
indicates that actual expenses are usually considerably lower than
published per diem rates.
It is expected that students
will travel by the cheapest available means, and will take
advantage of any savings requiring (e.g.) advance purchase or a
Saturday night stay. It should be noted that processing of
requests by the Houghton Fund usually takes 1-2 weeks, and it is
the student’s responsibility to ensure that the committee
receives the application in full (including the adviser’s note
of support) in sufficient time to permit this.
In any event,
the Committee must have the complete request at least one month
in advance of actual travel. No retroactive or late requests
will be considered: they are automatically declined.
Requests for support other than travel
The Houghton Fund Committee will consider requests from
students, individually or collectively, for support of any
legitimate educational or research activity. The Committee
will assess each such application on its merits, taking into
account the likely benefit of the proposed activity to the
student's intellectual and professional development, or to the
PAOC student body as a whole. Note that a student's
mainstream PhD research is expected to be funded through the
adviser's grants; the Committee will not normally approve
requests to support such research.
