The Steve Meshnick Travel Award
(This funding mechanism is not open at this time; next RFP will be spring, 2025)
Professor Steve Meshnick (UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health) was internationally recognized for his global work in understanding, preventing, and treating infectious diseases, particularly malaria and HIV/AIDS. Professor Meshnick was also instrumental to the creation of TriCEM and served in many roles within the organization, bringing incredible insight, energy, and inspiration to our community of scientists. To honor his contributions to TriCEM and specifically his dedication to graduate student training, we are proud to offer the Steve Meshnick Travel Award.
Graduate students at any TriCEM-affiliated university with work in evolutionary medicine, including in global health or epidemiology, are eligible to apply for the Steve Meshnick Travel Award. Award amounts are available up to $1,500 for domestic travel and $2,000 for international travel.
Eligibility: To be eligible for this award, the applicant must be a current graduate student at Duke, NC A&T, NCCU, NC State, or UNC-Chapel Hill with research relevant to evolutionary medicine, and travel to the conference must take place before completion of the student’s degree. Applicants must be planning to present original research at ASTMH.
To apply: Submit the following components in a single pdf to the application here:
- A research statement that describes your research and how it aligns with evolutionary medicine, focusing on the research that you propose to present. Limit 500 words.
- A description of how you will benefit from attending the conference, including how this aligns with your career goals. Limit 500 words.
- A budget justifying requested funds. Allowable expenses include conference/workshop registration fees, ground or air travel, lodging, per diem food expenses, or other costs directly related to conference workshop/attendance. TriCEM will award up to $1,500, but budgets should list all anticipated expenses, even if they exceed $1,500. If other funding sources will be supporting your participation in the conference/workshop, please ensure that they are also reflected in the budget.
- A letter of recommendation from the applicant’s faculty advisor/ PI, which also includes any information related to additional funds that are available to support the travel. The letter of recommendation will be submitted separately by the faculty advisor, but must also be received by the proposal deadline. Faculty letters of recommendation should be emailed to Charles Nunn (cln@duke.edu) in PDF format by the applicant’s advisor/ PI.
Previous recipients:
- 2024: Sean Connelly, MD-PhD student in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and member of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Ecology Laboratory.
- 2024: Sara O’Malley, PhD student in the Environment program at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment.
- 2024: Tyler Barrett, PhD Candidate in Evolutionary Anthropology
- 2024: Lev Kolinksi, PhD Student in Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University
- 2023: Rachel Keener, PhD Student in the School of Medicine, Duke University
- 2022: Katherine McVay, PhD Student in Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University
