The Magis Prize

Starting in academic year 2024-2025 and for three subsequent years, the Magis prize recognizes early-stage Associate Professors of exceptional creativity who are making a profound impact in their field of scholarship. It makes an investment in the candidate’s potential to make future advances, by providing $100,000 and two semesters of research leave to focus on scholarship. Further, it seeks to enhance student participation in advanced research collaborations with extraordinary faculty. Selected winners will have an outstanding scholarly record of unusually high impact, and present a compelling and potentially transformative research agenda. 

Three winners will be selected in each of the next four years. Each winner will receive $100,000 to support their research and two semesters of research leave free of teaching and service, to be used within three years. The two semesters of research may be taken together or apart or in combination with other research leaves but no more than three semesters of research leave may be taken consecutively. The two semesters of research leave will not count towards sabbatical accrual. Units will receive support for covering lost teaching due to the two semesters of research leave. 

Selection Process

Submissions are invited for the 2024-2025 Magis Prize from Associate Professors who were tenured in academic years 2021-2022, 2022-2023, or 2023-2024, in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Walsh School of Foreign Service, the McDonough School of Business, the McCourt School of Public Policy, the Earth Commons Institute, the School of Nursing, and the School of Health. 

Application materials include a current curriculum vitae (use template from tenure dossier) and a three-page essay describing the applicant’s research agenda that tackles a problem or challenge of importance to society today. Applicants may propose a new project or extend ongoing research.  The essay must address 1) significance of the problem or challenge; 2) general research approach; and 3) what makes the proposed work exceptionally innovative or original. A detailed budget is not required. However, a brief description of how the funds from the Magis Prize will further the research agenda and how Georgetown students will be included in the research should be included.  

Materials should be uploaded to this BOX folder by 5:00 pm on June 3, 2024.

Each application will be evaluated by two experts in the area of the proposed work from among the Georgetown University faculty. The application and the expert evaluations will be reviewed by a panel of distinguished faculty, who will make their recommendations for the three winners to the Provost. Winners will be announced in August 2024. 

Responsibilities of the Magis Prize Recipient

In each year of the three-year Magis Prize, the awardee will present a progress report on the work funded by the prize to the Provost. In the last years of the prize, the awardee will meet with Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) instructional design teams to consider how to incorporate the innovations created over the term of the prize into the Georgetown curriculum. When the research facilitated by the Magis Prize has reached an appropriate level of completion, the awardee will deliver a university-wide lecture describing the results of the research.  All publications resulting from the prize should cite the support of the Magis Prize.