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IS-MPMI provides travel grants to
eligible IS-MPMI members who are students, post-docs, or early career professional members to enable attendance of the IS-MPMI Congress. Selection of travel grant recipients will be based on the quality of the applicant's science reflected in the research abstract, impact statement, and curriculum
vita. Preference will be given to scientists from historically minoritized backgrounds.About the Fund
The Michael Mishkind IS-MPMI Travel Grants are named in honor of Dr. Michael Mishkind
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. These travel grants honor Michael’s memory and are funded by private donations.
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