Residential Fellowship Program

OVERVIEW


On this page:
About the Program  |  Benefits of Diversity  |  Program Activities  |  Center Services

About the Program
The Center offers a residential postdoctoral fellowship program for scientists and scholars from this country and abroad.  Since 1954, CASBS fellowships have been awarded to scholars working in a diverse range of disciplines.  These include the five core social and behavioral disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology as well as scholars from a wide range of humanistic disciplines, education, linguistics and the biological sciences.

Our formula for success is a simple one. We invite highly intelligent, provocative, productive scholars to spend an academic year in residence at the center where they are freed from deadlines, teaching responsibilities, committee assignments, hierarchies and the constraints of disciplinary silos. They join a community of other similarly liberated peers in a serene setting where they are able to interact in a sustained way, join small working groups or work alone. Their mandate is to ask challenging questions of themselves and others. Individuals who have been here often describe their center experience as productive, transformative and the best year of their entire career.

The Benefits of Diversity
Our primary goal is to identify the most accomplished and promising scholars in the fields represented at the Center. But our mission also involves a conscious effort to advance the careers of several groups that have often been overlooked in academia: younger scholars, minorities, women, international scholars, and scholars whose home universities are not research oriented. We seek outstanding scholars and scientists through our application and selection process. Our procedures aim to achieve a diverse group of Fellows in each Center class because we believe that a diverse class of Fellows benefits the group as a whole.

While here, in a community of inspiring equals, fellows support and mentor each other and form networks and habits of collaboration that last a lifetime. Fellows return to their posts with bold new theories that persistently change the way they and others think about what we know and what we can do to help solve the critical problems of contemporary society.

Fellows Program Activities
Many activities offer Fellows significant opportunities to engage with one another:

• a seminar series in which Fellows are invited to present their work
• informal seminars that emerge during the year, which give Fellows with broadly overlapping interests a basis for sustained conversation
• public meetings of special projects in residence, which give Fellows a chance to learn more about these projects and to engage with participants on substantive issues of mutual interest
• daily lunches at the Center, which often result in one-on-one meetings between potential collaborators
• special events and recreational activities organized by the Center

Center Services
The Center provides a range of services designed to make Fellows more effective and efficient while in residence, including:

• library assistance
• network and personal computer maintenance and support
• fax and mail services
• administrative services
• pleasant work spaces at the Center
• housing assistance when relocating to the Palo Alto area for the fellowship year