Members may apply for financial support to participate in an annual meeting of IAVS. These funds are very limited and the Global Sponsorship Committee will work with the local organizing Committee to set criteria and administer the application process. Information about how to apply for will be available on the website established for the particular meeting.

• Applicant must be a member of IAVS and give oral or poster presentation at the symposium. If you are not a member yet, you can join at the IAVS Membership Page (reduced and free membership is available for persons with financial constraints).
• The applicant can be a student or researcher.
• If the applicant has already received the grant for IAVS Symposium in the past two years, she/he can apply again but will receive only 70% of the total approved amount.
• Evaluation by committee members is based on a) motivation letter (+CV) and b) abstract. Each of the criteria is evaluated separately on a scale from 0 (poor) to 6 (excellent).
• Each application will be evaluated by three independent committee members who don’t have a conflict of interest with the candidate.
• The following score will be attributed to the career stage of applicants and will be used for the final evaluation: Graduate (MSc or PhD) student = 6; researcher without a position = 5; post-doc = 4, researcher/other = 2.
• The following score will be attributed to the economic situation of the country where the applicant is based: Low-income countries: 6; middle-income countries: 5; high-income countries: 3. The economic situation of a country is classified according to the most up-to-date value of its annual GDP as calculated by The World Factbook and compiled by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
• The final calculation is based on the average from abstract + motivation letter/CV + career stage + base country, with the following weights: abstract 2/6, motivation & CV 2/6, career stage 1/6 and base country 1/6.
• Applicants based in countries assisted by humanitarian aid from the United Nations (https://humanitarianaction.info/download/10836/download) will have an extra 0.3 points (equivalent to 5% of the total possible score) added to their final score.
• Applications need to specify the amount of money requested for each expense covered by the travel grant: 1) symposium registration fees; 2) travelling; 3) accommodation; and, if needed, also visa processing fees as charged by embassies (include a website link to the embassy with proof of cost). The travel grant cannot cover 1) extra-official events related to the conference, such as workshops and pre- and post-symposium excursions; and 2) expenses related to visa application, such as travelling costs and translation/authentication of documents.
• According to their financial situation and the funds requested for the travel grant, applicants need to explicitly agree to one of the following statements: 1) that they have no other funding sources; 2) that they have secured partial funding to attend the symposium and that the application is for the shortfall; or 3) that they have funding applications pending and will notify the GSC if awarded any funding to attend the symposium. In this last case, the amount of funding secured from other sources will be deducted from the total amount awarded by the travel grant.
• The awarded budget is not based on the budget requested by the applicant, but on the budget estimated by GSC committee (estimated cost of flight ticket, early bird registration fee, budget accommodation – one person budget hotel room nearby the conference venue). Conservative criteria are applied: the applicant will not get a budgeted allocation that she/he did not request (e.g. if accommodation was not requested in the motivation letter, it would not be awarded); on the other hand, if applicants requested a lower amount for an expense than we estimate the true cost to be (e.g. for accommodation), we use our estimate to make the award comparable to that received by others. Also, GSC does not support fee for pre- or post-symposium excursions.
• The total award (after discounts) should cover at least the price of the registration fee.

Our mission is to offer sufficient support to attend the Symposium to as many applicants as possible. Since the budget provided by IAVS is limited, we spend considerable time to do the evaluation in order to fair selection. Any budget, not used by individual awardee, will be used to support other applicants, either the same or next year. Please, do not apply for the travel award in case you do not necessarily need it. Also, if you manage to solicit funding from other sources (other foundation, institutional money, grant project) or you decide not to attend the symposium and you do not need the travel award (or a part of it) anymore, please inform the chair of GSC about this situation as soon as possible. This can be done both before the date of the conference, but also after it (before issuing the reimbursement). Double reimbursement of the same cost from different sources is considered as unethical behavior and will be investigated by Ethical Committee of IAVS, with possible consequences for the awardee (e.g. cancelling the reimbursement order and prohibiting the person from applying the IAVS travel awards in the future).

If you have been awarded a grant, click here to know what you should do next.