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Brace Graduate Top-up Awards

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The Brace Water Centre (Centre) is pleased to announce a call for the Brace Graduate Top-up Awards. Available to registered graduate students supervised by a Brace Faculty Member, the Graduate Top-up Awards aim to supplement the stipends of excellent McGill doctoral and masters students working on water projects that advance the Centre’s thematic research areas. This award is a one-time supplement to an already confirmed base graduate student funding package.

Award Funding

Each award will be funded up to $10,000 (Ph.D.) and $5,000 (MSc.) over one-year and is non-renewable. Up to ten (10) PhD awards and five (5) MSc awards are available for 2025.

Selection Process & Criteria

Each application will be assessed based on the following criteria:

Applicant’s academic excellence; refer to the Application Form for more details (50%);
Relevance of the project to the Centre’s thematic research areas. Research projects that that align with Major Brace's original vision of developing desalination methods and technologies in arid regions for irrigation and agricultural purposes, will be given special consideration (50%);

Award Conditions

Recipient of the award will:

be a Research Trainee member of the Centre and registered as a fulltime graduate student over the duration of the award (September 2025 - August 2026);
participate in a minimum of three (3) Centre events (i.e. research seminars, student activities, Brace Water Day, etc.) over the duration of the award.
complete a short research project progress report highlighting relevant achievements (e.g. workshops, webinars, conference or other presentations, journal submissions/publications, news media stories, etc.) and meet with the Centre Manager within 6 months of the award commencement date;
present their research—either as a poster or an oral presentation—at the annual Brace Water Day event within 12 months of the award start date for MSc students or within 24 months for PhD students;
Submit a summary of their research for use on the Centre’s website and other relevant promotional material;
acknowledge the Centre’s support in research publications or presentations that benefitted from support by the Centre;
include the Centre’s logo in presentations or promotional material related to the research that was financially supported by the Centre.

To Apply

To apply for the Brace Graduate Top-up Awards, candidates are invited to submit the following materials as a single PDF file to: https://forms.office.com/r/tJjURtt5Vs