Apply Now: Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine

Posted in: All Members, Opportunity to participate, Partners Sharing Information

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce applications are open to its Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine. The NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine provides individual awards of up to $10,000 to support research using the NLM collection.

Spanning eleven centuries, the NLM collection encompasses a variety of digital and physical formats and originates from nearly every part of the globe. The collection includes the Michael E. DeBakey papers—representing the diverse areas in which Dr. DeBakey made a lasting impact, such as surgery, medical education, and health care policy—along with the papers of many other luminaries in science and medicine.

Fellows may conduct their research onsite at NLM by studying the collection in the NLM Reading Room or remotely using NLM digital resources, including datasets and digitized and born-digital collections. Project proposals embracing innovative research methods and tools of the digital humanities are welcome. Applicants are expected to complete their work according to their proposal and within their fellowship year.

Support for research in collections that are intellectually related to those of the NLM will be considered, but the overall proposed research must be primarily rooted in the use of the NLM collection.

Application Details

Anyone aged 18 or older, from any academic discipline and status, who has not previously received this Fellowship, is invited to apply. Non-U.S. citizens may apply. Fellowships will be awarded to individual applicants, not to institutions. Group applications will be considered but will be subject to a maximum award of $10,000 for the entire project regardless of the number of participants. Group applications should be submitted under the name of a single principal researcher.

For more details about the application process and required documents, visit the Fellowship website.

To apply for the NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine, submit all required materials to the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences via the online application portal, by midnight ET, Monday, September 30, 2024. Selected fellows will be notified and awards will be announced in December.

For more information about the materials available for historical research at NLM, visit this NLM website intended for researchers or contact the NLM via NLM Customer Support.

About the Fellowship

The NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship was established in 2016 and is supported by The DeBakey Medical Foundation, in honor and memory of Michael E. DeBakey (1908–2008), a legendary American surgeon, educator, and medical statesman. During a career spanning 75 years, his work transformed cardiovascular surgery, raised medical education standards, and informed national health care policy. He pioneered dozens of operative procedures such as aneurysm repair, coronary bypass, and endarterectomy, which routinely save thousands of lives each year, and performed some of the first heart transplants. His inventions included the roller pump (a key component of heart-lung machines) as well as artificial hearts and ventricular assist pumps. He was a driving force in building Houston’s Baylor University College of Medicine into a premier medical center, where he trained several generations of top surgeons from all over the world. He was a visionary supporter of the NLM, playing a pivotal role in its transformation from the Armed Forces Medical Library in the 1950s, in the establishment of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine in the 1960s (today called the Network of the National Library of Medicine), in launching NLM’s outreach initiatives in the 1990s, and in promoting the digitization of its indexes to pre-1960s journal articles.

Learn more about Michael E. DeBakey from NLM’s Profiles in Science.