The CoLA Office of Research & Scholarship (CORS), through its Research Support Office (RSO), assists faculty members who are seeking (or have received) external fellowships. The most important aspect of applying for external fellowships is providing advance notice to your Chair in order to address your ability to pursue and accept external fellowships and the leaves and/or releases from instructional duties that are typically required alongside them.
Secondarily, CoLA's Senior Associate Dean for Research has identified that advance notice to CoLA's contracts & grants team (RSO) is important due to the general nature of external fellowships. The RSO team assesses whether or not problematic or concerning terms exist within an external fellowship, and can help determine if applying is feasible. Though rare, there have been cases of faculty members applying and being selected for a fellowship they ultimately were not able to accept due to conditions that were not in the recipient's best interests, or that were problematic for the University, College and/or Department.
Some fellowships give faculty members options for how they'd like to receive fellowship funds, and others prefer or even require issuing funds to an individual, outside of the university. How would these decisions impact you? Will you be required to go on leave without pay for some or all of the academic year? With advance notice, we can alert you to concerns, and provide you with information that will help you make decisions that make the most sense for you. Often, external fellowships are required to be administered through the university, which means the fellowship must be processed and approved through OSP as a sponsored project. This is a process handled by CoLA RSO (for all units that do not have in-house research administration support).
The following guidelines apply to all faculty applying for external fellowships, regardless of intent to apply for a CoLA Co-Sponsored External Fellowship (CSEF) award:
Notify their department chair.*
Faculty are required to consult with their department chair for the following reason:
Teaching: Release from teaching is typically necessary for applicants to accept a fellowship award. Faculty must consult with their chair to coordinate the potential reassignment of teaching duties. Additional approvals may be required if the award notification is received after the University’s student registration period (typically April for Fall semesters and November for Spring semesters).
Notify the COLA Research Support Office by completing the INTENT TO SUBMIT online form, which serves as the official process for notification. Once this form is submitted (with all required components), you have satisfied this requirement. Faculty are required to send fellowship terms of acceptance and associated deadlines to RSO, regardless of whether or not the application and/or fellowship is required to route through the University.
*If faculty do not notify their department or RSO in advance, the external fellowship may not be able to be accommodated, and the faculty member will be ineligible to apply for CSEF funding, even if the external fellowship is to be paid directly to the faculty member.
Per University HR Policy:
Upon receipt of any external award, applicants are also required to notify COLA HR with the fellowship terms, even if not applying for a CSEF.
In all cases, please submit in advance of applying:
Must include program or fellowship terms of acceptance or a link to program guidelines or terms
RSO requests 1 week or more in advance of submission deadline to review fellowship terms
The linked form below is for CoLA Faculty who have received a notice of award for a Fellowship from an External Funder AND the funds are to be administered by the University (OSP) for the purpose of:
Distributing funds as part of employment at UT
Avoiding the Faculty member having to go on leave without pay for the portion of time covered by the external fellowship
Preserving faculty insurance/health benefits