Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship for Sustainable Transport and Energy Efficiency

The “Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship for Sustainable Transport” supports the momentum of Lee Schipper’s contribution to the enrichment of the international policy dialogue in sustainable transport and energy efficiency.

The Scholarship aims to expand the contributions to sustainable transport and energy efficiency research and policy dialogue. In memory of Lee’s work, the Scholarship will support initiatives triggering and catalyzing transformative research and policy papers. The Scholarship emphasizes “iconoclastic” contributions (challenging conventional wisdom) that have clear, transformative outputs and contribute to measurable changes. The scholarship will support proposals that nurture different stages of policy dialogue, including:

• Data collection and data quality
• Diagnosis through data analysis (qualitative and quantitative)
• Policy analysis and evaluation
• Interdisciplinary and international comparative analysis

Funding Information

• The Scholarship recipients will receive two payments, each for 50 percent of the proposed research project costs (no more than US$5000 each).
• The Scholarship share of the costs will cover up to 100 percent of the costs for the proposed research project, but no more than US$10,000.

Eligible Projects

• EOIs and Applications must be for eligible research projects. These include the following requirements:
  • Topic must be related to Sustainable Transport or Energy Efficiency.
  • The topic(s) must be consistent with Lee Schipper’s main work areas in Sustainable Transport and Energy Efficiency:
    • Data collection and quality,
    • Diagnosis through data analysis (qualitative and quantitative),
    • Policy analysis and evaluation,
    • Interdisciplinary and international comparative analysis.
  • The research project has not been previously published or submitted to a journal.
  • Ideally, the research project will be completed by March 2025. Please indicate completion date if you are not able to comply with this date.

Eligibility Criteria

• Eligibility for the Scholarship Program depends on the applicant and application meeting the specified requirements.
• Applicants are eligible if they are young individual researchers. For the purposes of this Scholarship, a young individual researcher is a researcher that has five or fewer years of experience since their last academic degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) and is not yet 36 years old at the submission deadline for the EOI.
• The applicant must be a young individual researcher affiliated with an academic institution or research institution (public, private, or not-for-profit).
  • Researchers affiliated with academic institutions will be Masters or Ph.D. students, or post-doctoral research fellows at the time of submission of the EOI.
  • Researchers affiliated with research institutions will need to demonstrate that the research institution has been a legal entity for one year at the time of the EOI and that the research institution has a track record of published, peer-reviewed publications.

Application Requirements

• In general, applications must meet the following additional prerequisites:
  • Applications must be submitted in English;
  • Applications must be complete;
  • The research project must result in independent utility.
• All prospective applicants must submit an EOI through an online form, which consists of the following components:
  • Research Project Description – A brief (maximum 3,500 words) overview of the project’s main features, purpose, expected outcome, cost, and benefits from the research project;
  • Applicant Eligibility – answers to questions regarding applicant background, affiliation, and experience to carry out their proposed research project.
  • Supporting Documentation – including resume/CV, letter of recommendation, and list of academic publications.
• For the African scholarship, please highlight the intention to apply for the African scholarship on the cover page and the application letter.
• To focus prospective application efforts and remedy concerns, the Board may contact potential applicants if any questions arise from the information submitted in an EOI or if the information raises questions about the eligibility of the proposed research project or applicant.
• Applicants must complete all EOI package components as required in the section above; failure to do so may result in the application being removed from consideration for an award.
• Shortlisted applications in each scholarship call category (General and African) will be invited to submit a full research proposal. The components will consist of a 5 to 10-page proposal including the relevance of the work, the transformational character, the methodology, expected impact, timeframe, and costs in addition to the already provided information for the EOI. The full proposal will be submitted as a pdf via email.

For more information, visit World Resources Institute.