LSC Membership

To become a member

• Faculty (including all PTK faculty and postdocs): sign this agreement. You will be given a 0% FTE appointment to the Language Science Center in UMD's payroll system.
• Grad students (PhD and MA): fill out this form.
• Undergrad students: fill out this form.

Why become a member?

• You can vote for representatives (or be one!) on the LSC Steering Committee and Graduate Student Board.
• It helps make the language science community more visible to university leadership, which in turn helps us advocate for more support, and continue to offer a wide range of activities and resources for language science faculty and students.
• We offer a variety of services for members!
  • Priority access to the LSC space and resources (e.g. poster printing, A/V for virtual and hybrid activities, kitchen, space for running experiments, etc.).
  • Help with communications: our website, social media, and email lists reach hundreds of people at UMD and beyond.
  • Pre- and post-award management for grants and contracts
  • Help with event planning
  • Help manage participant payments via the Tango platform.

Expectations

Language Science Center members should find ways to contribute to language science research, education, and public engagement at UMD. There are lots of ways you can do this, depending on your position.

Research

• Share your research with the UMD language science community at LSC activities/events.
• Attend research talks (e.g. LSLT) and give feedback to students and faculty in other departments.
• Lead or participate in multi-department research projects.
• Run multi-department grants or programs through the LSC.
• Use LSC grant management services, if it benefits your research efforts.
• Acknowledge the LSC in presentations, papers, etc.

Education

• Mentor graduate or undergraduate students (beyond your primary advisees) via lab rotations or other mechanisms, including policy or applied/clinical rotations.
• Teach language science classes; co-teach with a colleague from another department.
• Speak with student groups, e.g., at the PULSAR seminar series, Language Science Lunch Talks, or student-led workshops.

Public engagement

Share your expertise with the broader community, e.g. local schools and families, policymakers, teachers, or industry groups. This can include participating in outreach events organized through LSC, or activities that you undertake individually. Our hope is for all LSC members to participate in at least one outreach activity per year.

Ownership

Help build the community and shape language science initiatives.

• Run for a position on the Steering Committee or Graduate Student Board.
• Participate in working groups or task forces.
• Lead or contribute to student-led activities like workshops or Winter Storm.
• Maintain a profile on the LSC website.

In addition, we ask faculty members applying for grants to allocate 5% of their individual credit to the LSC. This will allow university officials to easily track all language science faculty grants through UMD’s sponsored research system (Kuali Research), ensuring that the scale and breadth of language science research is transparent to the university. It will also allow for a small portion of DRIF to flow to the LSC to support research activities. For more information, see the FAQ below.

Frequently asked questions

Once I become a member, how do I create and update my directory profile?

Creating and updating your profile is easy! See the Google Doc here for instructions!

Does this mean non-members are no longer welcome at LSC events?

Certainly not! Activities and events will always be open to everyone; we want to spread the benefits of the LSC as widely as we can. The official membership of the LSC is a way for us and the university to keep track of the faculty and students who feel they have a stake in the language science community and the LSC, and to focus some of our resources and services on those people.

What if the standard faculty membership agreement doesn’t work for me?

Please let us know, and we’ll figure out something that works for you! We have tried to write the agreement to fit different positions and roles, but in such a diverse community we probably overlooked something.

What is “credit” on grants, and why is LSC asking for some?

​​On any grant where you are key personnel (PI, co-PI, sometimes other roles), you are assigned some percentage of the total “credit”, which is in turn split across the units you are affiliated with. This affects where indirect costs flow, but the university tracks it on all projects, even those with no indirect costs. Some faculty are accustomed to filling in this piece of the UMD routing form, while others might not have seen those forms because their department takes care of it for them.

We are asking faculty members to allocate 5% of their individual credit to the LSC on their grants and sponsored projects. This serves two purposes. First, it will allow us (and university leadership) to easily track all language science faculty grants through UMD’s sponsored research system (Kuali Research). This will ensure that the scale and breadth of language science research is transparent to the university. Second, this will allow for a small portion of DRIF to flow to the LSC to support research activities. It is a small way that faculty can show they have "skin in the game" in their support of the language science community.

How much money is this? Suppose that you and a colleague get a $100,000 grant (yay!), of which maybe $30,000 is indirect costs. After different parts of the university (Provost, VPR, libraries, …) take their cut, around 15% or $4,500 is assigned to the participating units. If the credit on the award is split 50/50 with your colleague, then the piece associated with you is $2,250. If 5% of that goes to LSC that would be a grand total of $112.50 over the course of the grant, i.e., around 0.3% of the indirect costs, or 0.1% of the total award. None of this affects the direct costs that pays for your research, your salary, etc. It’s all about the funds that support the university’s general research infrastructure (including lights and libraries).

The funds that would come from this would make a small contribution to LSC’s programming. But the main impact is that they act as a kind of “tracer dye”, so that university leadership can see the breadth of language science research at UMD. For that reason, even if you can only give 1% credit — the princely sum of $22.50 in our example — that would still make a difference.

Some faculty don’t have control over their credit assignments, or might not be in a position to do this. That could be especially true for PTK faculty. If this is your situation, please get in touch and we would love to find a way to adjust to your situation.