2016 iFellows Doctoral Fellowship Competition

Doctoral fellowships supporting Research on Coherence at Scale

The iFellows Doctoral Fellowship Program will award a two-year fellowship of $50,000 to selected iSchool PhD students during the 2016 – 2017 academic year to pursue independent dissertation research that supports the goals of the Coherence at Scale Program. Coherence at Scale is a broad-based program aimed at coordinating and aggregating national-scale digital projects in order to promote the development of new technology environments to support advanced scholarship across disciplines.

iFellows will be selected following a two-step application process that consists of a Letter of Intent and, if invited to do so, a Full Proposal. The Letter of Intent should demonstrate how the student’s dissertation topic aligns with and complements a topic of interest to the Coherence at Scale project.

Dissertation research relevant to elucidating technology and organizational issues related to Coherence at Scale goals would include topics bearing broadly on interoperability issues of scalable digital infrastructures, the information lifecycle, new scholarly workflows, and Internet accessible, open source tools, and resources for computation and data-intensive digital scholarship.

Deadline to submit a Letter of Intent for the 2016 Competition:  midnight, October 15

Applicants are strongly encouraged to identify partnering organizations for their work.  These would include university research groups (other than the applicants’ home institution), libraries and archives technology development groups, and commercial entities focusing on technologies development.

iFellows will work closely with their faculty advisors and mentors to select appropriate projects with direct relevance to the goals of the Coherence at Scale project. Each Fellowship will have a two-year term. The iFellows will be expected to build strong relationships with staff at a given project(s) as well as to engage with other iFellows on a regular basis.  

The iSchools organization is an international consortium of information schools in more than 50 research universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia whose primary focus is to understand the relationships – past, present and future – between information, technology, and people. The rapid growth and evolution of the consortium is a direct response to the ongoing explosive creation of digital information and its centrality to human endeavors.

The Coherence at Scale Program is led by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The Council on Library Information and Research (CLIR) is an independent, nonprofit organization forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh will serve as the administrative organization for the iFellows Program. Funding support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Questions? Contact Stephen M. Griffin