Prof. Ram Kumar Research Awards at the Academic Conferences

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Academic conferences play a vital role in catalyzing scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations by providing forum for researchers and practitioners to meet and discuss new advances.

We aim to support select conferences institute prestigious awards to celebrate accomplishments and thus motivate others to excel. Examples of such awards include test-of-time award, best paper award, career award, rising star award.

More in detail:

1. We insist that the conference organizing committee take sole responsibility of defining the selection procedure, making the selection, and doing the disbursement of the awards. We leave it to the conference to propose the award amount, though we expect the award amount to be commensurate with the awards given by similar conferences.

We expect the conference to amplify our support by not charging the registration fee from the recipients of our awards. We also expect that the conference will provide space in their program for the awardees to give technical lecture.

2. We are set up as a Giving Account at Fidelity Charitable. We can therefore recommend grants only to a U.S.-based 501c(3) organization or a body affiliated with a 501c(3) organization. We need the following information for your conference (or the the 501c(3) organization with which the conference is affiliated): i) Name and address of the organization, ii) Its Tax ID number, iii)  Name of the contact person, and iv) Phone number of the contact person. Using this information, we initiate the grant recommendation with Fidelity Charitable, which then directly sends the check.  Note that the award winners, selected by the conference, need not be U.S. citizens or U.S. based.

3. We appreciate that the conference website include information that describes the award and mentions our support immediately after receiving our grant.  We also appreciate to be included and linked along with other sponsors of your conference. Here are our links for this purpose: i) Foundation’s website, and ii) image of the Foundation’s logo. Please use the full name of the foundation: Professor Ram Kumar Memorial Foundation.  We also like to receive the names, affiliations, and websites of the awardees.

4. We do not seek thank you notes from the award recipients but would appreciate receiving a write-up (as a pdf file) on what led them to their award winning work and what were some of the false starts. The real story behind a research often goes untold, but can be hugely insightful. We will make these write-ups available from our website.

5. Return of the unused grant: To return any unused grant, the 501c(3) organization, to which the grant check was sent, needs to call the Fidelity Charitable Grants Team. Their phone number is  800-950-4438, option 4.

Next step:

Please send the following information to fellowships@ramkumarfoundation.org:

A) The name of the award you intend to give and the amount of the award.
B) Information listed in the item 2) above.
C) How the conference website will list us.

Thank you for providing us the possibility to contribute to your conference.