Purpose of the Fund
The IS-MPMI Michael Mishkind Travel Fund provides travel awards to IS-MPMI Members who are early career investigators presenting their research at the IS-MPMI Congress, with an emphasis of enabling historically minoritized scientists to attend. This travel award honors Michael’s memory and is funded by private donations.
Donate to the Fund
Unfortunately, in 2025, the long track record of travel fund support from NSF (and the US Department of Agriculture) was interrupted, forcing IS-MPMI to dig deep into its reserves to support travel awards for the 2025 conference in Cologne. This meant depleting the funds raised in our first round of fund-raising for the Mishkind Fund.
In preparation for our 2027 meeting in JeJu, South Korea, and to support interim programming like webinars and early career forums, our goal is to raise $40,000 to replenish the Mishkind Fund. If you are financially able, please consider a generous gift to support the attendance of an early career researcher to our 2027 conference and benefit from our on-line events.
As an added incentive, an anonymous donor has committed to giving $2500 once we hit the halfway mark of our target.
IS-MPMI is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, qualified to accept tax-deductible contributions during donor lifetime or bequests by will. Donations may be tax deductible. Consult your tax advisor on how the current law applies to you.
About the Fund
Dr. Michael Mishkind was well known to the IS-MPMI community as a program director at the United States National Science Foundation (NSF). He was also a professor at Bennington College in Vermont and performed research on heat stress tolerance in Chlamydomonas and Arabidopsis. Michael was a strong advocate within NSF for supporting research in the broad field of MPMI and was passionate in his support of interdisciplinary research and in broadening participation in plant sciences. He was co-founder of the NSF Division of Integrative Organismal Systems and, most recently, he advocated for and successfully implemented a joint program with the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture that was named the Plant Biotic Interactions (PBI) program, which provided a mechanism for funding projects across the entire spectrum of foundational to translational research in MPMI, helping to support projects that had previously fallen into the gap between those extremes. He also strongly supported our IS-MPMI congresses by funding ~15 travel awards for early career investigators to attend each meeting, with an emphasis of enabling historically minoritized scientists to attend. He was committed to attending our IS-MPMI congresses over the last two decades and met with countless researchers from the USA at those meetings to provide counsel on strengthening research proposals and generally to learn about our research successes, and to keep abreast of the future directions and opportunities generated by our international society. In addition to Michael’s scientific impacts, he was also a dedicated mentor to multiple IS-MPMI members while they served stints as “Rotating” NSF program officers, which are positions held by active researchers that maintain their research programs at their home universities while working full-time at NSF to fund foundational research in the plant sciences. The MPMI field, especially within the USA, benefitted greatly from Michael’s tireless support. Michael is also fondly remembered for his kind and gentle character.
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