The Global Institute for Advanced Study (GIAS) is a new initiative at NYU that represents a significant investment by New York University in research and scholarship.
The main purposes of the GIAS are to facilitate collaborative research on an international scale and to enable sustained attention to significant research programs that require work over several years.
The Institute will not be housed in any particular physical location but will use the resources of the University’s entire global network as its research facility.
The Institute will consist of several working research groups, 3 starting in 2011/2012 and building up to a total of 6 per year.
Each working group will be based in an existing department, center or school. Each working group will identify an important topic (which might be but need not be interdisciplinary) that the participants of the working group will agree to work on for several years (normally, 3 years).
The working groups will consist of something on the order of 10-15 individual scholars, assembled from around the world. Such working groups might, but need not, include institutional participants as well, for example, departments and centers at other universities.
The faculty participants will commit to attending two short (2-3 day) meetings/workshops a year and to exchanging papers and views between meetings. Much of the work will be accomplished through these continuous proactive exchanges over the duration of the three years of the program. The institutional members might commit to hosting occasional meetings of the working group. Most of the meetings, however, will be hosted by NYU, at the Square, at Abu Dhabi, or at one of NYU's other global sites.
Each working group will work towards an "end product" on its topic, for example, a published volume, a public conference, and/or a website.
Each working group will receive significant and sufficient funding to cover the cost of travel, accommodation, meetings, video links and other research costs. Further sources of funding may also be available.
Awards will be made to a group leader and a particular project that he or she will lead. The selection of awardees will be made by the Steering Committee of the GIAS, drawing on the advice of the Provost’s Academic Team.
Deans and other members of the University’s Academic Leadership Team will be invited to make nominations to the Director of strong candidates from the various schools. The Steering Committee will then select a certain number from among these nominees and invite them to work with the Director to develop a proposal for funding.
The number of invitations will not exceed the number of awards that are available at any given time, although there is no guarantee that all invited proposals will be funded.