research proposal example harvard

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Preparing a Proposal

A well-written and skillfully prepared research proposal is crucial to the success of an application for research funding and to the efficient set-up and management of an award. Early planning, and when needed, consultation with [email protected] is encouraged.

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Cross Lifecycle Topics

Research agreements.

There are several types of research-related agreements that researchers, faculty, and administrators may encounter. They vary by the goal and nature of the engagement, as well as the identity of the other party.... Read more about

Data/Document Retention

A set of basic principles to guide the retention and maintenance of research records by Harvard faculty and staff.  

Equipment Management

Preparing a proposal.

Harvard defines equipment as an item that costs over $5,000 and has an expected useful life of more than one year. A proposal requires special attention if it includes equipment.... Read more about

F&A, Fringe Rates

• F&A Rates - Federal Sponsors  
• F&A Rates - Non-federal Sponsors F&A Rates - Non-federal Sponsors: Indirect costs rates and bases for awards to Harvard within the last 5 years are available in  GMAS  on the “Recent overhead rates” section of each sponsor’s Organization page.  
• F&A Rate Agreements After World War II when the federal government initiated a close partnership with universities in pursuit of the research enterprise, recognition was given to the infrastructure costs needed to support this expensive endeavor.  
• Fringe Benefits Rates Fringe benefits (FB) are employee associated costs such as health plan expenses, pension plan expenses and workman's compensation expenses, among others.

Stipend & Fellowships

Stipends are payments made to individuals for subsistence support or to defray expenses during a period of academic appointment. Stipend payments are not compensation for services rendered and, therefore, are not allowable on federal awards unless the purpose of the agreement is to provide training to selected participants and the charge is approved by the sponsoring agency (OMB Circular Uniform Guidance, Subpart E). The most common type of federal awards that include stipends are fellowships and training grants. Additional information is available in the...

Harvard Global

Harvard Global Research and Support Services, Inc. was established in February 2012 and is dedicated to providing operational support for Harvard University’s international activities. Harvard Global follows Harvard University’s institutional policies and is a 501(c)(3) corporation.

Departments or faculty who are either requesting to submit a proposal to one of the below Harvard Global sponsors or are receiving funds from these sponsors should reach out to the Harvard Global Grants and Contracts Specialist at OSP,...

Sub-Recipient Monitoring

Harvard University is responsible for monitoring the programmatic and financial activities of its subrecipients to ensure proper stewardship of sponsor funds. The PI is primarily responsible for ensuring that the subrecipient is meeting the programmatic objectives of the project. The PI and Department/Local Level Managing Unit provide administrative and financial oversight of the subrecipient to confirm that the subrecipient invoices align with the project deliverables. 

For subawards under federal prime awards, Harvard must comply with OMB Uniform Administrative Requirements...

The Award Lifecycle

A well-written and skillfully prepared proposal is crucial to the success of an application for research funding

Setting up an Award

Steps must be taken to set up accounts or authorize pre-award spending before spending begins

Managing an Award

Ensure compliance while maintaining public trust in research results and outcomes

Closing out an Award

Timely closeout of sponsored awards is essential to Harvard's compliance with sponsor requirements and University policies

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Do you have any guidelines for writing the research proposal and the scholarly writing sample?

Research proposal.

Your research proposal should be no longer than 2000 words. References and citations will not count towards the word limit. The Selection Committee is most interested in the relevance and the contribution your research makes to your discipline. These should be clear in the research proposal.

The Selection Committee is also interested in how you intend to use the two years of the fellowship. In many cases, Academy Scholars intend to use the first year to prepare the dissertation for publication as a book or a series of articles and the second year for a new research project. If applicable, scholars should summarize their publication plans and future research plans. If you expect to begin a new research project that is significantly different than your PhD dissertation, you should introduce the topic and perhaps explain how your new research continues/expands your doctoral research or takes you in a different direction.

Applicants may wish to consult the essay  "On the Art of Writing Proposals" (pdf) by Przeworski and Salomon on the SSRC website. Note, however, that this essay is written with specific proposals in mind, rather than The Harvard Academy's broader interest in an applicant's research and her or his plans beyond the first project.

Scholarly Writing Sample

The size of the writing sample should be equivalent to a single PhD dissertation chapter or single-authored peer-reviewed academic journal article. It may be published or unpublished but must be in English. The maximum page length is 50 pages (references, citations, formulas, and graphs do not count toward the page limit). Only one writing sample may be submitted. Any pdf files with multiple writing samples will not be considered.

Application News

The 2024 academy scholars program application season opened on july 1, 2023. the deadline was september 22, 2023. .

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Writing Project Proposals

Some applications will ask for an essay outlining a proposed project, including details of the design and plan for carrying it out. Remember that your essay is essentially an exercise in expository writing, but with a twist—it also needs to be persuasive.

As you get ready to write, think about the following questions:

How will you demonstrate the match between yourself and a particular project?

• What inspired or motivated you for this project?
• Language proficiency? Coursework? Contacts? Organizational affiliation? Experience traveling alone?
• Why there? Why now? How is it important or meaningful?

What makes you a strong fit for a particular opportunity?

• Does the project benefit from specific skillsets, values, experiences, or accomplishments?
• How can you concisely share an anecdote(s) from your life that directly demonstrates why you are a good fit for this opportunity?

How will you demonstrate the feasibility of your project?

• Can your project be completed within the timeframe allowed?
• Have you laid the appropriate groundwork (e.g., made connections with local scholars; introduced yourself and your project to the archivist; learned specific software or equipment; getting IRB approval; and more) to convince the committee that you are ready to start (and ideally complete) your project on time?
• Consider your audience. Selection committees typically are comprised of faculty from a broad range of academic disciplines, so write for an intelligent reader, but someone who’s probably not an expert your specific field.

How will you craft your essay to be persuasive in text and tone?

• How will this project/experience impact your future goals/pursuits?
• What will the impact of this project be—on both you as the applicant as well as on the field/community/target audience?
• What about your project is timely, so that the committee understands that your project needs to be completed now and could not be similiarly accomplished in a couple years’ time? Are we on the cusp of something important in your field, something pressing within a group of people, or at an important part of history or policy, for example? What is the urgency surrounding your project?

Selection committees want to learn about you . Be sure to connect the opportunity at hand to your past experiences—compelling moments in your personal and/or academic life, interesting anecdotes, something that shaped your outlook or motivated you. Make sure you focus on relevant experiences, though. Your essay should not be a narrative version of your resume nor a cover letter. Tell the committee who you are, what you value, what makes you "tick," what you want to do, how you plan to do it, and why it’s important—and do so in an honest voice.

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• Do you have any guidelines for writing the research proposal?

Research Proposal

Your research proposal should be no longer than 1500 words. References and citations will not count towards the word limit. The Selection Committee is most interested in the relevance and the contribution your research makes to your discipline. These should be clear in the research proposal.

The Selection Committee is also interested in how you intend to use the fellowship year. In many cases, Fellows intend to use to prepare the dissertation for publication as a book or a series of articles. If applicable, scholars should summarize their publication plans and future research plans. If you expect to begin a new research project that is significantly different than your PhD dissertation, you should introduce the topic and perhaps explain how your new research continues/expands your doctoral research or takes you in a different direction.

Applicants may wish to consult the essay "On the Art of Writing Proposals" (pdf) by Przeworski and Salomon on the SSRC website. Note, however, that this essay is written with specific proposals in mind, rather than the Research Cluster’s broader interest in an applicant's research.

• What should I include in the cover letter? How is it different from the research statement?
• If I am offered the fellowship, may I defer for a year or delay the start date?
• I would like to carry out fieldwork away from the Cambridge, MA, area. Would that be allowed during the fellowship?

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FAS Research Administration Services

• Sample Proposals

FAS Research Development has collected samples of successful proposals from recent award recipients that are available to FAS and SEAS faculty and PIs by request. Those proposals marked with an asterisk* are available to postdoctoral scholars.  If you are interested in obtaining a copy of one of these proposals, please contact us . Requests for sample proposals must come directly from FAS faculty, postdocs and PIs.

If you are interested in an award that is not on the list below, please let us know and we will do our best to add to our library.

Available proposal narratives:  

• Fellowships
• Digital Innovation Fellowships
• Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships*
• Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface*
• Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award Program
• Charles A. King Postdoctoral Research Fellowship*
• Climate Change Solutions Fund
• Cottrell Scholar Award
• Dana Foundation Program in Brain and Immuno-imaging
• Dean's Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship
• Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)
• Army Research Office
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award
• Defense Threat Reduction Agency
• Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP)
• National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship/Vannevar Bush  Faculty Fellowship
• Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (YIP)
• Department of Energy Early Career Research Program
• Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award
• Ford Foundation
• Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts Grants for Organizations
• Religion and International Affairs Program
• Asia Program
• Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Awards in Neurosciences
• McDonnell Foundation Studying Complex Systems Award
• Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminars
• The Milton Fund
• Moore Inventor Fellows Program
• NARSAD Young Investigator Grant*
• Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
• Summer Seminars and Institutes
• Summer Stipends
• Early Independence Award*
• Maximizing Investigators' Research Award for Early Stage Investigators
• New Innovator Award
• Pioneer Award
• Division of Astronomical Sciences (AST)
• Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BST)
• Division of Earth Sciences (EAR)
• Division of Environmental Biology (DEB)
• Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS)
• Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE)
• Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES)
• EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) 1
• Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER)
• Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI)
• REU Supplement
• New York Stem Cell Foundation Neuroscience Investigator Award
• Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering
• Radcliffe Institute Fellowship
• Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Award
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• Russell Sage Foundation
• Searle Scholars Program
• Simons Investigators Program in Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems
• Sloan Research Fellowship
• Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research
• Smith Family Odyssey Award
• Smith Richardson Foundation International Security and Foreign Policy Program
• Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship
• Star-Friedman Challenge for Promising Scientific Research
• Weatherhead Center for International Affairs: Harvard Academy Junior Faculty Development Grants

1. Applicants are advised to contact the NSF program officer(s) whose expertise is most germane to the proposal topic prior to submission of an EAGER proposal. Each NSF program may have different requirements and procedures regarding proposal submission.

• Getting Started
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Jennifer Corby

Preparation of Doctoral Thesis Proposal

Independent study with doctoral advisor to produce a preliminary literature review.  Prerequisite : Enrollment in GSD DDes program. 

Proposal Support

Developing research proposals.

ORSD offers faculty and staff at the Chan School assistance in developing and writing effective and successful grant proposals.

Please use the links to:

• Learn about the services that ORSD provides to assist faculty with proposal development, including editorial services and external reviews
• Check out the new ORSD Proposal Toolkit, a new online tool for investigators to find important information meant to support proposal development and funding strategies.
• Discover NIH Grant Writing workshops and courses offered by ORSD
• Read sample NIH applications for assistance in preparing proposals
• Plan the development and submission of grant proposals using our timelines
• Find out about Harvard Catalyst’s resources for investigators conducting research across multiple schools or institutions through their  Streamlined IRB Review for Multi-Institutional Studies .
•   Understand the NIH Application and Review Process

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Harvard proposal samples

Related Papers

NEW ACADEMIA: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory

Chandrama Basu

The corpus of the First World War poetry is predominantly masculine in its extent, being preoccupied with the experiences of the participants in the war, namely the male soldiers, and limited to poems by canonical war poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and others. The First World War, however, has been one of the most transmogrifying experiences for the entire human civilization in general. It marked the end of an era of optimism and aspiration and ushered in an age of overt cynicism and desperation for all members of society, irrespective of their age, class, or gender. Following this, the paper intends to consider women war poets of the First World War of the likes of Helen Hamilton, Alexandra Grantham, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell among others, with an intention to contend that the testimonies of women's perceptions of war are as socially pertinent as the narratives produced by their male counterparts, provides a more nuanced picture of the war experiences and plays a prominent role in contradicting the misogynistic approach of the male poets whose poems often relegated women to the position of passive and at times imprudent beings who were unable to apprehend the magnanimity and atrociousness of war.

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In this essay I am going to examine in what way gender was a concern for a selection of modernist writers and that while in many ways modernism was alive with misogynistic and male-centric literature, there were a few who went against the grain and empowered women. Firstly, I will examine Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s role as a ‘proto-modernist’ and early feminist after which I will assess Virginia Woolf’s contribution to twentieth century modernist literature as one of the first modern feminist writers and critics. Finally, I will explore American author John Steinbeck’s depiction of women in Depression era America as portrayed in his documentary novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.

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For more than the obvious reasons, the First World War was a devastating experience for Europe. As the first war in history in which the death toll would be immense – due to the extensive use of weapons of mass destruction – it was a traumatic experience even for those who were not directly involved in the armed conflict. The dehumanization introduced by the war caused disillusionment regarding the ideals of enlightenment and the progress myth of the Modernity Project. One of the preeminent writers of the period, Virginia Woolf was among those writers who were deeply traumatized and disillusioned by the experience, even though she was not an active participant in the conflict. In her novels Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse she offers a depiction of gender polarization and women as traumatized victims of the war. This paper, thus, aims to evaluate the First World War and the trauma and disillusionment caused by it as experienced by women through the novels of Virginia Woolf.

The twentieth century has been a century of wars, genocides and violent political conflict; a century of militarization and massive destruction. It has simultaneously been a century of feminist creativity and struggle worldwide, witnessing fundamental changes in the conceptions and everyday practices of gender and sexuality. What are some of the connections between these two seemingly disparate characteristics of the past century? And how do collective memories figure into these connections? For Virginia Woolf, who wrote Three Guineas in the aftermath of the first great war of the century, with the second approaching, the connections were quite clear. Not only did Woolf claim that the position of the "educated man's sister" was different in "the home of freedom" than that of her brother and she questioned his claim to "patriotism;" 2 but went further to suggest that women had and should have "no country." For her, women could best help men prevent war "not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods." 3 An essential medium for Woolf herself in her search for new words and new methods was, of course, literature-yet, this was a literature where critical engagement with memory and history remained central. "History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men," 4 she exclaimed, and in her diverse body of writing, Woolf practiced new methods for simultaneously challenging the ways in which women had been written out of human history, and for constructing alternative narratives to encourage, inspire and empower women. She wrote endlessly about both the genius of as well as the cruel (patriarchal) limits faced by women whose remembrance and recognition as historical subjects, she claimed, could potentially change all women's lives.

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Format Research proposal – Harvard University

Writing Research Proposal

The research proposal is your opportunity to show that you—and only you!—are the perfect person to take on your specific project. After reading your research proposal, readers should be confident that…

• This project has been thoughtfully designed and crafted by you
• The background you have for this project is sufficient;;
• You have the proper support system in place;
• The steps you need to take to complete this project are clear to you; and,
• With this funding in hand, you can be on your way to a meaningful research experience and a significant contribution to your field.

Research proposals typically include the following components:

Objective, significance, and implications of research.

• Why is your project important?
• How does it contribute to the field or to society? and
• What do you hope to prove?

Detailed plan for research

• This section includes the project design, specific methodology, your specific role and responsibilities, steps you will take to execute the project, etc.
• Here you will show the committee the way that you think by explaining both how you have conceived the project and how you intend to carry it out.
• Please be specific in the project dates/how much time you need to carry out the proposed project.
• The scope of the project should clearly match the timeframe in which you propose to complete it!

Use of funds

• Funding agencies like to know how their funding will be used.
• Including this information will demonstrate that you have thoughtfully designed the project and know of all of the anticipated expenses required to see it through to completion.

Faculty/advisor involvement

• It is important that you have a support system on hand when conducting research, especially as an undergraduate. 
• There are often surprises and challenges when working on a long-term research project and the selection committee wants to be sure that you have the support system you need to both be successful in your project and also have a meaningful research experience. 
• Some questions to consider are: How often do you intend to meet with your advisor(s)? (This may vary from project to project based on the needs of the student and the nature of the research.) What will your mode of communication be? Will you be attending (or even presenting at) lab meetings? 

Be sure to include relevant information about your background and advocate for yourself!

Is there anything you have learned from a previous research experience (or leadership position, job, coursework, etc.) that can be applied to the project in question?

Do you have experience applying a specific method of analysis you learned in class to a different situation?

Be sure to include any previous experience with this professor/lab in your proposal!

This will demonstrate your readiness to start right away to the selection committee, and

Lastly, be sure to know who your readers are so that you can tailor the field-specific language of your proposal accordingly.

If the selection committee are specialists in your field, you can feel free to use the jargon of that field; but if your proposal will be evaluated by an interdisciplinary committee (this is common), you might take a bit longer explaining the state of the field, specific concepts, and certainly spelling out any acronyms.

https://uraf.harvard.edu/apply-opportunities/app-components/essays/research-proposals

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