Grants and Writing Resources for New York University

At Ph.D. Live!, NYU's university-wide contest in explaining graduate research to a general audience, two Tandon doctoral students took the top honors in 2025. First place went to a civil and urban engineering student who studies how light breaks down pesticides in water. The audience-favorite prize went to a PhD student at Tandon and NYU Abu Dhabi who researches how the gut and brain affect sleep. Each year the NYU Center for the Humanities funds three Doctoral Fellows.

Undergraduate Research Funding

The Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund has awarded more than $4.5 million to over 5,500 student projects. Its Research Grants pay up to $1,250 to an individual or a team, open to CAS first-years, sophomores, juniors and first-term seniors. Money can go to equipment, archive or lab travel, software, data sets, or income lost from cutting back hours at a job.

Once a project is done and accepted at an outside conference, a CAS student can apply for a DURF Conference Grant of up to $1,000 toward conference costs such as registration and travel. Closer to home, the College's annual Undergraduate Research Conference invites every NYU undergraduate to present. Humanities projects are welcome alongside work in the sciences.

Dissertation Fellowships

Each year the NYU Center for the Humanities funds three Doctoral Fellows, who receive a nine-month stipend commensurate with MacCracken funding and a $2,000 research grant, and don't teach that year. At least three more nominees are named honorary fellows under the GSAS Dean's Dissertation Fellowship, each with a $2,000 research grant and full access to the Center's programs. Candidates must be ABD humanities or arts doctoral students in GSAS, IFA, ISAW, Tisch or Steinhardt. Departments make the nominations, up to two each, and fellows attend a weekly seminar.

Where Student Writing Appears

The Expository Writing Program publishes Mercer Street, an annual collection of the best work done in EWP courses the year before. Any student in an Expository Writing course can submit one essay from that course. New issues go on sale at the NYU Bookstore each fall and appear online a year later.

Every NYU dissertation is indexed in ProQuest's Dissertations and Theses Global, according to the NYU Libraries dissertation guide, and many are available there in full text. Authors can embargo the full text for up to two years. The library catalog lists them too.

Help With Writing

The NYU Writing Center books sessions in person and online with faculty consultants, senior tutors and graduate writing consultants. Students can have up to six appointments a semester. Consultants work on the writing with you and won't proofread or copyedit the draft.

Steinhardt graduate students also have the Steinhardt Writing Center, which offers one-on-one consultations for master's and doctoral students along with regular small-group workshops through the semester.

When a paper, thesis, or dissertation is ready for a final edit, our editors can help. See our New York University dissertation and thesis editing and New York University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.