Guest Post: From an AuthorAID Travel Grant Recipient

[This post is from Dr. Lalith Ekanayake, of the Bio Conservation Society (BCS), Sri Lanka. Dr. Ekanayake recently received an AuthorAID travel grant. I thank him for submitting this post. —Barbara]

This year I submitted an abstract to the International Sea Turtle Symposium, and it was accepted. But I lacked travel funds to attend the symposium. I therefore submitted a travel grant application to AuthorAID and waited for a reply.

About 3 weeks before the symposium, I received email from AuthorAID that my travel grant application had been accepted. So I was very happy and quickly booked tickets to attend the symposium, which was in New Orleans, USA.  I already had a US visa, and therefore I managed to attend the symposium without any problem.

I both presented a poster paper in the main part of the symposium and coordinated the Indian Ocean South East Asia regional meeting. Further, I gathered knowledge on many new research findings about sea turtles around the world. So thanks to AuthorAID and INASP for the funding support.

[Note: The next request for AuthorAID travel grant applications and workshop grant applications will go out this summer. We will announce it in the AuthorAID blog and AuthorAID email discussion list. If you might like to apply, feel free to be thinking ahead.]