Acknowledging OUR Support

Successful applicants to SURF and other funding programs should acknowledge support from the Office for Undergraduate Research (OUR) in any publications resulting from the project. The OUR recognizes, however, that the form of those acknowledgments may vary depending on the format of the publication or presentation. Please follow the guidelines below for acknowledging OUR funding in various situations.

Published Paper or Manuscript

If you are publishing research funded by the OUR as a paper or manuscript, you will most likely have a short section for acknowledgments. Within that section, please include the following sentence, changing the specific funding (here, it is a SURF) depending on what funding you received:

This research was funded by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the Office for Undergraduate Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If your research was funded only partially by OUR, then use the following sentence:

This research was funded in part by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the Office for Undergraduate Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Panel Presentation

If you are presenting your research as part of a panel presentation or as a talk, please state that funding from the OUR helped with your research. Most likely, it would be best to state this at the beginning of your presentation when discussing the background of your research or in a section of your talk where you recognize those who have contributed to your research. You may use one of the sentences above (under Published Paper or Manuscript) as a guide for wording.

Poster Presentation

When presenting a poster, space is incredibly limited. As such, feel free to use any abbreviations in order to fit the acknowledgment on your poster. For example:

Funded by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the OUR at UNC-CH.

Placement can also be an issue with posters. If you do not have a separate section for acknowledgments, then the above acknowledgment could come as a tag placed in the corner of the poster, at the bottom of the abstract, or in the introduction. Considering that poster formats vary between fields and conferences, it would be best if you could ask a professor or mentor where such an acknowledgment could go that wouldn’t seem out of place.