Carleton’s Rena Bivens is one of three Carleton Carleton recipients of the prestigious 2013 Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships.
The Banting program is designed to attract and develop top-tier researchers from Canada and around the world. Each year, 70 fellowships are awarded, with funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Bivens will receive $140,000 in research funding over two years.
Bivens, who is in the School of Journalism and Communication, has been recognized nationally and internationally for her research. She is currently investigating the design of social media platforms to discover how and why non-profit organizations (NPOs) are using them. Bivens is particularly interested in the use of these technologies by NPOs to educate and advocate for strategies and policies that aim to end gender-based violence.
She has five tips for PhD students who are interested in obtaining a postdoctoral fellowship when they graduate:
- Do your best to find a good match for your work, both in terms of supervisor and university/department
- Ensure that you make the connections in your application (i.e. stress that the supervisor and university is a great fit because of Institute X and fellow colleagues Y and Z, etc)
- Depart from your PhD research but choose something that you are very passionate about
- Make many, many drafts of your proposal and ask WIDELY for feedback; send it around to people even when you are not entirely happy with it; also, talk casually to as many people as you can about your ideas so that you are forced to keep reformulating your thoughts
- Figure out what gap you are hoping to fill and make the case for why it is vital that your work is funded
More information about how to become a PDF is available on our Postdoctoral Fellow web page.
More information about the other two Banting recipients is available on our Grad Student website.
In the next newsletter, you can read more tips on becoming a PDF from Sophie Tamas, another Carleton Banting recipient.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013 in News, Postdoctoral Fellowship News
Share: Twitter, Facebook
