February 17, 2025

The UNM Office of the Provost has set aside funds intended to supplement limited department- and college-level support to help faculty pay for professional conference attendance.

This program will provide up to $2,000 per tenured or tenure-track Albuquerque campus faculty member for the purpose of travel to present a paper or results at a professional conference, or to attend an exhibition or performance of their own creative work. Funding is limited to one award per faculty member per year.

Applications are open through InfoReady through 11:59 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 28. Award announcements will be made mid-March. For inquiries, please email provost@unm.edu.

The Office of the Provost feels strongly that conference attendance is important for faculty for a variety of reasons, including enhancing the reputation of UNM by making it possible for faculty to share their ideas and discoveries widely with their colleagues. Sharing the good work of our faculty can bring positive outcomes for the university, and for faculty to be fully engaged in the University’s mission of intellectual inquiry and creative production, our faculty must connect with their peers around the world. Conference attendance allows the best ideas to be developed and tested among a global network of knowledge.

Various UNM departments already provide travel funds to assist faculty to attend professional conferences. However, the Provost’s Office recognize that department and college travel funds for faculty have become more constrained and are inconsistently available.

Priority will be given to assistant professors for whom establishing scholarly networks is most critical. However, requests for funds will be accepted from faculty in all tenured and tenure-track ranks.

To be eligible, recipients must:

• Demonstrate that the cost of planned travel exceeds all other sources of funding, including research grants, discretionary funds, and existing departmental and college travel funds.
• Be current tenure-track or tenured Albuquerque campus faculty
• Be using the funds to present a scholarly paper or creative work, or otherwise systematically share results of their scholarly investigations or creative works at a professional conference. This program does not support general conference attendance.
• Secure a sign-off from a department chair or dean authorizing the travel and attesting to the need for supplemental funding for the proposed trip. Note: The provost’s travel funds can used to augment existing funds, and funding from this program is intended to be the last dollar.
• Travel must otherwise meet all applicable UNM policies, and recipients must provide a college or departmental index to which the provided funds will be transferred.

In order to promote community and sharing of ideas within UNM, any faculty member whose travel is supported on this program is encouraged to present a short version of their work, or share a new insight they gained from their conference, at a UNM venue, ideally beyond the recipient’s home department. This could include presenting at a Lightning Lounge, a Center for Teaching and Learning workshop, or another extra-departmental colloquium. It should be noted that faculty who are writing grants for external funding should always try to include conference travel as one of their direct costs.