Funded by the McPherson Eye Research Institute’s Cycle for Sight event, the Visiting Scholar Award Opportunity provides support for a McPherson ERI Member to host a Visiting Scholar for 3-7 days at their institution. These visits are intended to facilitate lasting collaborations and/or training in support of broadly vision-related research, including bioengineering, technology development, imaging, data visualization, cognitive psychology and/or neuroscience, ophthalmology, and general biology of the eye. Each Visiting Scholar will also participate in one event on the UW-Madison campus that is organized or co-organized by the host and that can be attended by McPherson ERI members and Trainees (e.g., a lecture, a seminar series talk, a workshop, roundtable discussion). (If the host’s institution is NOT UW-Madison, it is still required that the host use a portion of their awarded funds to bring the Visiting Scholar to UW-Madison to satisfy the requirement that they participate in a UW campus event.)
For each visiting scholar, funds of up to $3000 will be available to support the costs of travel, lodging, and meals (which can include, if the hosts so wishes, pizza and refreshments for their visitor’s lecture on campus). Awarded funds are given to the host (not directly to the visitor), and it is the responsibility of the host to work with MERI administration to book the visitor’s travel and lodgings. If hosts are at UW-Madison, for some expenses they may use their P-card (later reconciled using a MERI funding string) and e-reimbursement so long as those expenses have been approved by MERI administration. All travel by the Visiting Scholar must be completed sometime between March 1 and late December of the year the applicant (i.e., host) was notified that they won the award.