The National Science Foundation (NSF) offers several funding mechanisms that support graduate student research. In this webinar, we presented an overview of the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (DDRIG) offered by programs in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate at NSF, focusing on Linguistics, Documenting Endangered Languages and Cultural Anthropology. NSF DDRIG grants can only be submitted by Ph.D.-granting universities accredited in and having a campus located in the U.S. (This means that international students are eligible if enrolled in a doctoral program at a U.S. institution that meets the criteria.)

This two-hour webinar, held on Friday, February 2, from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM US Eastern Standard Time, begins with a presentation from NSF Program Officer Colleen Fitzgerald that includes a program description, elements of the proposals, review criteria, and strategies for putting together a competitive proposal. This focuses on the general elements common for DDRIG proposals. Dissertation advisors and doctoral students who have successfully applied for DDRIGs also participated in the webinar. There is also a discussion on program-specific considerations like deadlines or solicitation-specific criteria used by reviewers. The webinar is likely to be of interest to dissertation advisors (who must act as the Principal Investigator on a DDRIG proposal submission) and doctoral students (the CoPIs of the submission), so both faculty and students are welcome. There is time for a Q&A session at the end of the webinar. 

Colleen Fitzgerald is the Program Director for Documenting Endangered Languages, a joint funding initiative between the NSF and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a rotator from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she is Professor of Linguistics and directs the Native American Languages Lab.

Her expertise includes phonology (especially prosody and the verbal arts), morphology, Native American languages, and language documentation and revitalization, with much of her recent work funded by the National Science Foundation, and various other grants.  Her work with Native American tribes in documenting and revitalizing their languages is now in its third decade.  Recent projects include co-directing the Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop from 2011 to 2014, a collaboration with the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, and training in various venues focused on Native Americans and other citizen scientists. Her publications consist of more than 20 refereed articles and book chapters, especially on Native American languages, including their phonology. Research methods in many projects draw on participatory and community-based research approaches. 

In 2014, Dr. Fitzgerald served as the Director of CoLang 2014, the Institute on Collaborative Research, the fourth iteration to date of this international training venue for language documentation and revitalization, which creates the next generation of scholars and language activists documenting and revitalizing endangered and minority languages worldwide. Strongly committed to public outreach, she is engaged in advocating for endangered language research and science in various publication venues, as well as developing social media campaigns and innovative public programming such as a Native American languages film festival and an Endangered Languages Week.

Jeff Good is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo. His research interests include morphosyntactic typology, Niger-Congo languages, and language documentation, and he currently directs an NSF-funded projecting documenting a cluster of endangered languages in Northwest Cameroon. He has advised two PhD students who were successfully awarded doctoral dissertation improvement grants under the Documenting Endangered Languages, Linguistics, and Cultural Anthropology programs at NSF, and he has also provided feedback on a number of other successful NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grant applications for students at the University at Buffalo and elsewhere.

Megan Figueroa is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation, "Who breaked the rule? Rethinking English Past Tense Overregularizations," is in part funded by an NSF DDRI - Linguistics.