On March 19, 2025, ASPB’s Board of Directors approved the creation of a temporarily restricted fund to support travel awards, SURF recipients, and ASPB-subsidized childcare. The ASPB Plant Biology Temporarily Restricted Fund is intended to provide critical but flexible support for conference attendees via three potential avenues.
Specifically, donations into this Fund will be used to address specific urgent needs that may arise in 2025, 2026, and/or 2027 for travel awards, SURF recipients, and childcare but which cannot be readily predicted in advance. Donations to the Plant Biology Conference Participation Temporarily Restricted Fund may be used from April 1, 2025, through December 31, 2027, to support travel awards, SURF recipients, and/or childcare subsidies. The intent of the Fund is to both provide support where it is most urgently needed to support travel awards, SURF recipients, and childcare subsidies in any given year, based primarily on demand, and to offer donors a more immediate impact from their donation.
This year – 2025 – the most acute need is for support of the SURF program. SURF is a long-running ASPB activity that funds promising undergraduate students to conduct research in plant biology laboratories. It is a competitive program and in 2025 we received many more worthy applications than can be funded within the existing budget. Additionally, at this time of increased national pressure that limits undergraduate research opportunities (see, e.g., doi: 10.1126/science.z97ov67), the need for this program and its potential for expansion has never been more urgent and impactful.
Please consider making a contribution to the Plant Biology Conference Participation Temporarily Restricted Fund to support future generations of plant biologists, including through the SURF program. If you’d prefer to provide exclusive support for SURF and would like to see your donation applied to a permanently restricted fund (meaning that your donation, per se, will not be spent and that only earnings on the fund will be used to support SURF), you may donate to the previously approved SURF Award Endowment fund.
Because SURF recipients present their research at ASPB’s annual Plant Biology meeting in the year following the fellowship award, their participation enriches the meetings and increases the visibility of undergraduate research as it contributes to the viability and future of the society.
Similarly, any donors who wish to donate specifically in support of childcare or travel awards may instead make a permanently restricted donation to the Romanoff Fund or the Joe Varner Travel Award Fund, respectively.
___________________________________
Thank you, Crispin Taylor. It seems that the creation of this fund is an important step in supporting conference participants and meeting their needs.