Propose your PhD

Example PhD Proposals

While we're waiting to cook up some specific advice on proposing your PhD thesis, check out these example proposals from previous years:

• Dan Keefe's visualization PhD proposal from 2006
• Tomer Moscovich's graphics PhD proposal from 2006
• Daniel Acevedo's visualization PhD proposal from 2006 (presentation PPT)
• Dana Tenneson's graphics PhD proposal from 2007 (presentation PPT)
• Andy Wald's biomedical engineering PhD proposal from 2007
• Evan Leventhal's biomedical engineering PhD proposal from 2008

Grant Proposals

The older examples above are "proposals" in the sense used by the CS department; they come rather late in the PhD process and are balanced more toward reporting extensive thesis work so far than toward actually proposing work to be done. It may be useful to model PhD proposals that truly propose work after grant proposals. Check the following links for grant proposal guidelines and examples:

NIH

• NIH guide to proposals
• Example proposal: DTI+MRI-based Tools for Analyzing White Matter Variation by Laidlaw, Ahrens, Allman, and Bastin
  1. First submission
  2. NIH Reviews
  3. Revision A1, in response to the first round of reviews
  4. NIH Reviews of the revised proposal
  5. Revision A2, in response to the second round of reviews

NSF

• NSF grant proposal guide
• NSF guide to proposal writing