Early Career Support

One of our missions is to help support early career scholars. To learn more, click one of the links below. To help support early career scholars, consider donating to one of these initiatives or donating your time. Learn more about how to get involved.

Mentoring, Supporting, & Awarding Early-Career Scholars

PSA Member Communities

We have member communities for early career scholars and graduate students, to provide an opportunity to get to know, help support, and learn from from one another. The Member Communities also provide an opportunity to get to know more senior scholars related to topics of interest or to connect with scholars near you. Learn more about PSA Member Communities.

Meet the Editor, Grants, and Other Training at our Conferences

Our conferences have a number of events aimed at early career scholars, such as our popular Meet-the-Editor of Philosophy of Science, where scholars can get a behind the scenes look at how journal publishing works, and our regular NSF sessions, where scholars can meet with officers of the NSF to discuss grant writing projects. We have also begin holding outreach and engagement training workshops on the last day of the conference.

Early Career Scholar Awards

The PSA presents two awards to early career scholars, the Ernest Nagel Early-Career Scholar Essay Award which is awarded annually to the best single-authored essay published in Philosophy of Science during the award year by someone who is either a graduate student at the time of publication or received a Ph.D. within the past five years, and the Mary B. Hesse Graduate Student Essay Award, which is to the best single-authored paper submitted by a graduate student as a contributed paper for the biennial meeting and accepted for publication in Philosophy of Science by the PSA Program Committee. Both awards are presented at the Awards Ceremony at our Biennial Meeting. Learn more about our early career scholar awards.

Reduced Membership and Conference Fees

The PSA is devoted to helping those just starting out in the field, including students, those who are underemployed, and those from countries where currency inequities make membership and travel to our conference difficult. To help, we offer significantly reduced membership and conference registration fees to students and those who are underemployed. We also have a Sponsor-a-Scholar Program to provide free membership to those from countries where currency inequities make membership unaffordable. Read more about the Sponsor-a-Scholar Program.

Biennial Meeting Travel Grants

The PSA also offers travel grants to early career scholars. We offer two types of travel grants, one supported by the National Science Foundation, which is limited to U.S. citizens and those at U.S. institutions, and the PSA Travel Grant, which is directed at those not eligible for the NSF Travel Grant. The goal is to help early career scholars from around the world travel to our biennial meetings. We also have a limited number of reduced priced rooms at our conference hotel for graduate students. Applications for travel grants and student rooms are announced in late summer prior to our biennial meeting.