Internal Review Panels

Potential reviewers are nominated based on the following criteria: 

Preferred qualifications:   

• Faculty or academic/professional staff on KU’s Lawrence-Edwards campus.   
• Able to analyze grant proposals effectively against published submission and evaluation criteria.
• Able to express evaluations in writing following established submission and evaluation guidelines.   
• Interested/invested in the support of research, scholarship and creative activity as demonstrated in administrative, philanthropic, community, scholarly and/or creative activity/record/service.    
• For Racial Equity Awards panel: Interested/invested in the advancement of racial equity through research, scholarship and creative activity as demonstrated in administrative, philanthropic, community, scholarly and/or creative activity/record/service.  

Preferred backgrounds:    

• A diverse range of identities that includes representation of groups historically excluded from higher education.
• Scholarly experience representing a range of career stages and disciplines, including arts and humanities, social sciences and STEM.  
• For Racial Equity Awards panel: Demonstrated history/experience in racial equity research, scholarship, creative activity, community engagement and/or community organizing. 

We recruit enough reviewers so the work for any single panelist is not too burdensome. The time commitment breaks down as follows:   

• Participate in scheduled review-specific bias mitigation training once a year.  
• Meet for orientation on each internal award program (Racial Equity Awards are separate).  
• Review proposals and complete written assessments during the identified four-week period.  
• Meet with discipline-specific panel (or Racial Equity Awards panel) to discuss proposals and assessments.  

Proposal deadlines for these internal awards:

• NFRD – Oct. 1 + March 1
• Racial Equity Awards – Nov. 15
• A third program is pending evaluation

The timeline may vary depending on the volume of proposals.  

Reviewers will be recognized and thanked publicly for their service but are not compensated monetarily at this time. Therefore, we ask unit leaders to strongly weigh the importance and time commitment of serving on an internal review panel when making decisions about other unit-level service. 

One of the most important components of the review process is providing applicants substantive written comments, including a description of the strengths and weaknesses of their proposals. All proposals, whether funded or not funded, receive reviewer feedback with a goal of improving application quality and success rate. Reviewers are asked to create a thorough and thoughtful written evaluation of each proposal. As part of their panel, reviewers will also hear input from other reviewers, engage in discussion, and work to resolve discrepancies in scoring — all while further improving their own grant writing, developing evaluation and critique-authoring skills, and serving the university’s scholarly community.