New Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellowships launched

Aug. 27, 2002 -- This fall, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research will be funding a new post-doctoral program based at the University of California, Berkeley -- three full-time, nine-month residential postdoctoral fellowships a year for five years. The Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellowships will begin this fall or next January, depending on whether the program has sufficient applicants.

To jumpstart the program, a San Francisco Bay area consortium of universities, research institutes, and disability agencies will recruit people with advanced professional degrees who want to broaden their theoretical outlook and their disability research methodological skills to apply for the fellowships.

Each Fellow will be matched with a senior faculty Mentor, and each Fellow will also participate as a Mentor for a matched undergraduate disability studies student. The program will offer structured, monthly, Bay-area-wide seminars; the Fellows will present research work at these seminars. They will also attend at least one class each semester chosen from among the offerings of consortium partners. Each Fellow will also have the opportunity to participate in teaching at Berkeley by delivering guest lectures.

Fellows will also conduct their own research; the program will assist Fellows in identifying funding to pursue disability studies and rehabilitation research and publication opportunities after the conclusion of the Fellowship.

For more information on the Fellowships, contact Susan Schweik at sschweik@uclink4.berkeley.edu or Devva Kasnitz at devva@earthlink.net

Disability studies is a growing field. A number of schools around the nation now have major disability studies programs. Among the best known of these are:

The Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at http://www.uic.edu/depts/idhd/

The Center on Disability Studies at the University of Hawaii/Manoa, at http://www.cds.hawaii.edu/

The Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University, at http://soeweb.syr.edu/thechp/disstud.htm

The Arizona University Center on Disabilities at http://www.nau.edu/~ihd/

and

The Institute on Disability (University of New Hampshire) at http://iod.unh.edu/

There are many other disability studies programs in the U.S. and the number is growing daily. We encourage readers of this E-Letter to send us information about other U.S. disability studies programs at the University level. Send information to info@accessiblesociety.org

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