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Research, Grants, Contracts and Other Funded Initiatives

As an Organized Research Unit (ORU) of UCSD, CILAS is charged with generating cross-disciplinary research supported by extramural funding. The CILAS Director and staff are available to work with faculty in generating these proposals and shepherding them through the UCSD Contracts and Grants office; we can also provide limited office space in support of graduate students working on grants solicited through CILAS.

Research activities at CILAS have been funded in the past by the US Department of Education, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and its Pacific Rim Research Program, among others. Currently, CILAS has two significant federal awards supporting faculty research and graduate student training.

"Military Transformation and the Rise of Brazil"

The project "Military Transformation and the Rise of Brazil" (PI David Mares) examines the potential for Brazil to achieve major power status in the international system, its likely behavior as it rises and the likely response of current powers to the newcomer. The conditions leading to the rise of new powers and their impact on the international governance structures (whether they seek to support, modify or oppose) has been a major theoretical concern of scholars working on international affairs for decades. This project will contribute to that literature focusing on the role of science and technology in the Brazilian defense sector. The project is supported by a three year $1 million Department of Defense Minerva Research Initiative award and brings together three UCSD faculty with colleagues from the Naval Post graduate School, the University of New Hampshire and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Brazil and will fund up to five UCSD graduate students. The anticipated product is peer-reviewed articles on the topic and we will not engage in classified research.

Early Model-Based Event Recognition using Surrogates

CILAS (PI David Mares) has a subcontract with The Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science at Virginia Tech for its project EMBERS (Early Model-Based Event Recognition using Surrogates). Surrogates are accessible pieces of information that mirror or precede events of interest.  The project intends to organize a huge database of surrogates predictive of real events and to apply these surrogates to public data sources using mathematical models, algorithms, and software to forecast significant societal events, ranging from epidemics and nationwide credit-rate crashes to crime and violent protests by analyzing the billions of pieces of information in the ocean of public communications, such as tweets, web queries, news reports and daily stock market activity. The EMBERS project is supported by a potential $13.36 million three-year contract (CILAS share is $367,000) from the Open Source Indicators (OSI) Program of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; continuation after the first year is contingent upon satisfactory progress. No classified research is involved and tracking or identifying individuals is strictly excluded from the research. The goal is to build predictive models and publish the results of our research in peer-reviewed venues to contribute to the growing social science literature on the use of enormous volumes of public data to understand biological, social, economic and political behavior. The CILAS subcontract supports one UCSD faculty member, one graduate student and other research expenses.

Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous People’s Conference

CILAS hosted the Latin American Studies Association’s Research Committee on Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous Peoples in November 2010, partially funded by Title VI and contributions from various UCSD offices. Over 300 scholars from around the world convened at UCSD; some of the best papers have been revised for review as two volumes forthcoming by Cambridge Scholars Publishing and others will be published in the journal Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (LACES).

Legal Pluralism

CILAS Director Mares collaborated with Professor James Cooper of California Western School of Law in AY10-11 to convene scholars from New Zealand, Canada, the US, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia and Peru in a workshop on legal pluralism with comparative perspectives on indigenous peoples from across the participating countries. This topic is critical as the constitutions of many Latin American countries have recently been amended to explicitly acknowledge indigenous rights, culture and legal traditions, but little work has been done to explore how nations as centralized as many Latin American ones are, may simultaneously recognize multiple legal systems. This workshop was funded primarily with Title VI grant support; the CILAS Director has been working with the Division of Social Sciences' Development Office seeking foundation and gift support to continue this work.

2017 CILAS Dissertation/Thesis Travel Funds

The Center for Iberian & Latin American Studies

invites applications from UCSD graduate students studying Latin America

2017 CILAS Dissertation/Thesis Travel Funds

This grant is generously supported by the UC San Diego Graduate Division.
Application Deadline: Monday, April 3, 2017 (Midnight)
CILAS expects to announce the awards in early May 2017.

A. UCSD APPLICANTS
1. Who can apply?
Travel grants are available to graduate students to conduct dissertation/thesis-related research in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries (including Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain). Grants will be awarded to students for travel and field-related expenses for brief periods (four weeks to four months) of dissertation/thesis field research in Latin America. Individual recipients may be graduate students at the master's or doctoral level, although priority will be given to doctoral students.

Travel dates: Travel can occur after June 1, 2017 and completed by September 30, 2017. The awards may be used only for brief research trips, two weeks to four months in duration. Travel awards will be reimbursed only for authorized expenses; CILAS cannot provide funds prior to travel.

There will be a one hour information session on Wednesday, February 15, 2017 at 9:30 AM, Thursday, March 2, 2017 at 3:30 PM, in the CILAS library, located in the Gildred building at the Institute of the Americas Complex, UC San Diego.

B. SELECTION PROCESS
Grant recipients will be selected by a committee of three UCSD. The awards range from $300 to $2,000.


Complete Application

Working Groups

Funding & Academic Award Opportunities at UCSD

There are many funding opportunities available for graduate students, recent PhD's, faculty and staff at the University of California, through the Office of Graduate Studies.

Recipients of Awards, Grants & Fellowships