Bill Pettit Memorial Award

Bill Pettit Memorial Award - £3000

Deadline for 2024 applications: 30th September 2024

NatSCA is pleased to invite applications to this year’s Bill Pettit Memorial Award. Up to £3,000 of grant money, is available to NatSCA members this year to support projects including the conservation, access and use of natural science collections.

Charles Arthur William ‘Bill’ Pettit (1937-2009) started his career with the National Institute of Oceanography but moved to the Manchester Museum in 1975 to become Assistant Keeper of Zoology. In his time at Manchester, Bill worked tirelessly for the collections and was instrumental in projects such as FENSCORE as well as numerous publications. It is in recognition of his commitment to natural science collections that we would like to offer this annual award.

Projects will be assessed against NatSCA’s mission and are scored against: conservation of collections, collections access, collections use and timescales and costs. We are looking for innovative projects with a tangible legacy. Each project will be considered on its own merits by the NatSCA committee and the committee’s decision, including not awarding any money that year, will be final.

We particularly welcome projects related to NatSCA’s key priorities around:
• Core work around collections management
• Climate Crisis
• Decolonisation, anti-racism, equality, access and inclusion
• Digitisation

To apply please fill out the application form below.
Download application form (Word Doc)

Projects previously supported:

2021/2022:
Bateman Ichthyosaur Conservation (Awarded £2510)
Beavering Away (Awarded £2000)
Morris Young Beetle Collection (Awarded £1165)

2020/2021:
The Last Passenger: Conservation of the SS Great Britain Cormorant Skeleton (Awarded £1424)
Curating, Digitising and Displaying a Unique Historic Odontological Collection (Awarded £2100)

2019/2020:
University of Liverpool Zoology Redisplay Project (Awarded £1840)
Leo Conservation Project (Awarded £1105)

2017/2018:
A Virtual Flora of Tullie: “Sowing the Seeds” to Digitise a Nationally Significant Herbarium (Awarded £1200)
Taking wing: Curation of a Venezuelan Hawkmoth collection (Awarded £805)

2016/2017
Uniting and rationalising catalogues of different collections in a Life Sciences (Awarded £750)
Nature Notes – increasing access to local wildlife (Awarded £750)

2013/2014
Saving the World’s Rarest Skeleton (Awarded £750)
Cataloguing of three large collections of deep-sea samples held in the Discovery Collections (Awarded £750)

2011/2012
The Margaret Gatty algal herbarium in the St Andrews Herbarium (Awarded £1848)
Victorian Taxidermy conservation project, Ipswich Museums (Awarded £784)