Program Pre-Proposals

Preliminary decisions on programs for the year 2026-2027 will be made at the Advisory Board meeting in early February 2025. Submit your pre-proposal to KITP no later than November 8. 
 
Prior to submitting your pre-proposal, you should have:  
  • A title for the proposed program.
  • Names and email addresses for three to four prospective organizers who have expressed interest in working up a full proposal and serving as program coordinators.
  • The names of about twenty prospective program participants who are examples of the sort of participants you hope to attract and invite to the program. You should not contact the prospective participants at this time. We request the names to help the advisory board characterize the sort of program you are hoping to run.
  • Determined the subfield committee you want to review your submission.  The subfield committees are:
    • Astrophysics
    • Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics
    • Biophysics
    • Condensed Matter
    • Earth and Planets
    • Elementary Particles
    • Gravity
    • Math
  • Decided if you want a second subfield committee to review your proposal and select it if you do. 
  • A one-page, pdf-format write-up containing: 
    • a one-to-two paragraph overview of the program’s topic. 
    • paragraph-length rationale explaining why a KITP program could help answer questions within the topic area, which should include plans for encouraging collaboration and knowledge integration among the program’s participants.
  • Your name and contact information.
  • Full proposals are NOT required at this stage.

Deputy Director Mark Bowick will review pre-proposals as they arrive. If elements are missing from the pre-proposal, he will contact you. 

Members of the advisory board will review pre-proposals starting in December. The subfield committee you selected in your application will review your proposal first, then they will then pass it to the second subfield committee, if you’ve selected one. A subfield committee may also pass your proposal to another committee, if they feel the other committee can better assess it. 
 
Each subfield committee looks for: 
  • Coordinator talent, energy, and commitment to recruiting, inviting and hosting a diverse pool of applicants over up to a 12 week-long program.
  • A coherent, timely and rich theme – a proposal should address big ideas or outstanding problems or plan to lay out the key directions for future research in its chosen topic.
  • An aim to review and critique the state of the art in the field and explore current developments.
KITP hosts programs across all of the subfields of physics. A surfeit of excellent proposals in a particular subfield may lead to an otherwise excellent pre-proposal being declined.
 
By early-January, you will be notified if your pre-proposal will be encouraged for development into a full proposal. KITP will send instructions for writing a full proposal, as well as any Advisory Board notes, at that time. If you wish to preview the full proposal process, you can view the guidelines. KITP Director Lars Bildsten (805-893-3979), will be pleased to discuss ideas for programs and to answer questions you may have about the process of proposing them.

Submit a pre-proposal now!