Excellent post! Regarding fellowships and scholarships within academia, I would also suggest offering pre-PhD fellowships similar to NSF, NDSEG, or Hertz, which support a student’s full grad school tuition. The stipulation would be that the student’s dissertation would need to be related to animal welfare-related topics, which is similar to how NIH training grants in the USA are already structured. A similar model could work for postdoctoral fellowships.
This would have the following benefits:
Winning a competitive fellowship pre-PhD looks great on a student’s CV and can help them get into grad school and find an excellent advisor.
In many academic departments in the US, it can be hard for even well-funded faculty members to take on students to work on animal welfare topics, because their existing funding is earmarked for other topics.
Related to the above, most funding for animal welfare research is unfortunately tied to specific projects, making it hard for faculty to find funding for training students on these topics.
Regarding encouraging faculty to work on animal welfare topics, establishing less restricted funding sources (i.e., earmarked for animal welfare research, but not tied to a specific project) for faculty with strong track records of working in this area would improve substantially on the current model and incentives.
Excellent post! Regarding fellowships and scholarships within academia, I would also suggest offering pre-PhD fellowships similar to NSF, NDSEG, or Hertz, which support a student’s full grad school tuition. The stipulation would be that the student’s dissertation would need to be related to animal welfare-related topics, which is similar to how NIH training grants in the USA are already structured. A similar model could work for postdoctoral fellowships.
This would have the following benefits:
Winning a competitive fellowship pre-PhD looks great on a student’s CV and can help them get into grad school and find an excellent advisor.
In many academic departments in the US, it can be hard for even well-funded faculty members to take on students to work on animal welfare topics, because their existing funding is earmarked for other topics.
Related to the above, most funding for animal welfare research is unfortunately tied to specific projects, making it hard for faculty to find funding for training students on these topics.
Regarding encouraging faculty to work on animal welfare topics, establishing less restricted funding sources (i.e., earmarked for animal welfare research, but not tied to a specific project) for faculty with strong track records of working in this area would improve substantially on the current model and incentives.