Grants and Writing Resources for the University of Louisville

Four UofL students won Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards, UofL News reported in June 2026. A 2026 biology graduate will study and do research in Australia. Two more graduates of that class, one from the College of Business and one from the School of Public Health and Information Sciences, will teach English in Taiwan and Indonesia, and a doctoral candidate in the College of Education and Human Development will go to Norway. The same announcement named the university's first Luce Scholar, an alumna with two UofL degrees who is also the first Luce Scholar from any Kentucky institution.

Summer Research and Showcases

The Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity runs the Summer Research Opportunity Program, ten weeks of research with a faculty mentor in any discipline. Students receive $3,500 over the ten weeks, and the mentor gets a $500 supply allowance. Applicants must line up a mentor first and include that mentor's letter of support. The program invites arts and humanities students to apply. It ends with each student presenting a poster at the Summer Research Showcase.

The Undergraduate Arts & Research Showcase is open to undergraduates from every college and department, in every discipline. UofL also sends five students to present original research, as posters or talks, at the ACC Meeting of the Minds, with all travel expenses paid. Others take faculty-mentored posters to Posters at the Capitol in Frankfort, an annual event that puts undergraduate research from Kentucky's state-funded universities in front of the people who fund higher education in the state.

A Library Prize and Student Journals

UofL Libraries gives two $1,000 University Libraries Undergraduate Research Awards every spring semester. Research papers, digital media projects, posters and creative works all qualify. Applicants meet with a librarian or archivist about the project, then submit the final version with its bibliography, a reflection essay on how they used library resources and a professor's letter of recommendation. Applicants must also agree to have their work featured in ThinkIR, the university's institutional repository.

The journal's ThinkIR page describes The Cardinal Edge as UofL's only faculty-reviewed and peer-reviewed multidisciplinary undergraduate research journal. Students hold the seats on its editorial board and its design, review and outreach teams, and it publishes research articles, reviews and commentaries. Music students have a newer outlet. The School of Music published the first issue of Confluence: Emerging Voices in Music Research and Creativity in 2026, a refereed open-access journal for written, creative, pedagogical and multimedia work by students.

Graduate Fellowships and Grants

The Graduate School's University Fellowship goes to outstanding prospective doctoral students. It pays a stipend, full tuition and health insurance for four years, two funded by the Graduate School and two by the student's program, and carries no service obligation in the Graduate School's two years.

Smaller grants come from the Graduate Student Council. Students may request $500 to $750 in GSC Research Funding for costs such as equipment and data sets, with priority for students who have no other money for their research. GSC Travel Funding pays up to $350 to present at a conference and up to $200 to attend one. Both require that the student's program have a representative in good standing with the council. At commencement the Graduate School gives the John M. Houchens Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, named for a former registrar, to the doctoral student with the most meritorious dissertation of that commencement.

Writing Center and Thesis Submission

The University Writing Center holds 50-minute appointments every day of the week, in Ekstrom Library Room 132 or online, and a consultant can also give written feedback on a submitted draft. Its graduate programs include a week-long Dissertation Writing Retreat, where every participant works with the same consultant all week and applies with a letter of support from an adviser. The semester-long Graduate Fellows Program pairs a writer with one of the center's Assistant Directors, who are advanced PhD students, for regular feedback on a dissertation, thesis, article or grant.

Format follows the Graduate School's Guidelines for the Preparation and Processing of Theses and Dissertations, which supersede any other style manual a department suggests. They limit a thesis abstract to 150 words and a dissertation abstract to 350. The Graduate School reviews each thesis before the student submits the final copy, which goes in as a PDF to ThinkIR for acceptance by University Libraries. A student and adviser may jointly ask the Graduate School dean for a six-month embargo. The guidelines state that dissertations and theses are published exactly as submitted.

Because a UofL thesis is published exactly as submitted, it makes sense to book a final edit for grammar, consistency and Graduate School format before the PDF goes to ThinkIR. See our University of Louisville dissertation and thesis editing and University of Louisville essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• The Secret to Better Grades: Starting Your Writing Process Early
• Writing the Abstract and Title: First Impressions Matter
• Escaping the Revision Pile: Strategies for First-Round Approval