Over the next months, your program’s Deputy Director, the KITP program manager, the program assistant and the conference assistant will be supporting you as you build a community of physicists from the ground up! You will be at the center of this community, responsible for assembling a diverse, engaged group of scientists eager to share their work with one another.
As a coordinator you will:
- Reach out to potential participants, encouraging them to apply and to plan on visits of at least 3 weeks, and ideally 6 weeks or more!
- Consult with colleagues to find promising participants whose work you may not yet be familiar with.
- Follow up on the publication records of unfamiliar candidates to make sure you aren’t missing a great, potential participant.
- Advertise your program within your field or sub-field on list-servs, at conferences, or at meetings.
- Recommend which applicants to invite to your program and when to invite them.
- As you recommend applicants, reach out to them to determine if their availability has changed, or can change, or if they have specific questions or needs that can be addressed by KITP.
- Strive to build an exceptionally diverse program!
- Refer applicants with questions about KITP resources to the program manager or deputy director.
KITP will offer:
- Logistical and Financial support for both you and the participants by:
- Managing the invitation process.
- Guaranteeing housing for scientists, their partners and families.
- Offering funding for family travel and daycare, and by providing other family resources.
- Providing remote teaching and meeting facilities.
- Accepting applications for a limited amount of travel support. Granting coordinators money for travel and transportation to and from the program.
- Considering one or two participants per program for teaching buyouts.
- Distributing travel funds to participants with financial need.
- Oversight:
- An insistence on a diverse group of participants.
- Decades of experience running long-stay physics programs.
- Advertising:
- A general email about your program to past participants of similar programs.
- An annual poster mailing to physics departments, labs, and industry.
We’ll tell you the target for the average number of long-term participants per week. We’ll also give you an upper-bound on participants in any given week. Included among the long-term participants should be at least 8-10 key long-term participants, who will form the core of your program. In addition to the long-term participants, you’ll also invite one to two short-term participants per week and up to 5 affiliates per week.
Invitations to KITP are always made in whole week quantities. A participant is invited for, say, 1, 3, or 7 weeks, but never half a week or 4 weeks and a day. Invitations begin on a Sunday and end on a Saturday (except for the first week of the program, where an invitation may begin on Monday). Participants must have a PhD by the time the program begins. Graduate students can be sponsored as affiliates.
Glossary of KITP Terms
Affiliate: Affiliates are usually still in graduate school. If a postdoc is not among the invited participants, they may be invited to attend as the affiliate of a more senior participant.
Affiliates must be nominated by their mentors. Outside of coordinators, participants may only nominate affiliates after they have accepted their invitations. Coordinators may nominate affiliates prior to recieving their formal invitations.
Consider nominating outstanding graduate students who can come to KITP for an extended stay as Graduate Fellows. KITP provides financial support to Graduate Fellows for both local and travel expenses.
Coordinators’ data site: The Coordinators' Data Site is accessible only to coordinators and KITP staff. It lists all of the applications to your program along with the applications' status.
After logging on, you will see two lists. The upper list is applicants who have been invited; the lower list is those who haven't. At the top of each list is a link, "Click for details," which brings up a page with all of the applications in that list. To review a single application, click on the applicant's name.
At the bottom of the web page is a link to an Excel workbook containing three tabs: (1) invitees, (2) affiliates, and (3) applicants. The columns are the weeks of the program and the rows are applicants. Each cell indicates the status of an applicant during a week with a status code. The legend of codes is at the top right of the data site. If you are holding a conference, the column label for the conference week will appear in boldface, italic font. Weeks with an observed holiday are labeled with red font. On holidays, there will be no scheduled activities at KITP and no staff will be present.
The data in this workbook is automatically updated 3 times per day from the KITP database and is as up to date as the web page itself. It may take several days for information to be entered into the database by staff.
Key long-term participant: A scientist you identified during the program proposal process who you feel will be a core part of your program.
Long-term participant: A participant visiting KITP for 3 weeks or more.
Short-term participant: A participant visiting KITP for 1 or 2 weeks. Invite short-term participants sparingly. Try to use the slots for people who cannot visit for long due to family obligations.