Outstanding Professors/Researchers (OPR)
The University of Colorado Boulder will pursue this option for obtaining permanent residency for your international permanent employee if they are someone who is recognized internationally as outstanding in their field and has at least 3 years of work experience beyond their advanced degree.
Filing in this category is a two step process:
- The University files an immigrant visa petition for the international employee on Form I-140, and documents that the hire meets the criteria for the Outstanding Professor/Researcher category.
- Upon approval of the Form I-140, the international employee files for a "green card" as the beneficiary of the immigrant visa petition that the university filed for them. This step can sometimes be done concurrently with the first step. Consult ISSS on the pros and cons of filing concurrently.
Initiating The OPR Intake Review Process
The sponsoring department or research institute must initiate the Outstanding Professor or Researcher Permanent Residency Sponsorship (OPR) Intake in the MyISSS Departmental Services portal.
- The department administrator, international scholar's direct supervisor, and scholar must complete e-forms in this request.
If the scholar is not in a tenured or tenure-track position, ISSS requires a memo signed by both the employee’s direct supervisor and the Department Chairperson or Research Institute Director verifying that the job is permanent in nature with guaranteed funding for at least five years.
- One legal criteria for Outstanding Professor/Researcher is that there is an offer of permanent employment; a permanent position being defined as that which is tenured, tenure-track, or for research positions, those that are long term and indefinite in nature. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been focused on the issue of permanency for research positions in the past.
ISSS will review the Intake e-forms and any accompanying memo within two weeks and follow up accordingly. If filing an Outstanding Professor/Researcher (OPR) permanent residency petition for the employee is feasible, ISSS will arrange a meeting to outline the next steps and discuss timelines, which may vary depending on the scholar’s current nonimmigrant status and other OPR cases in the queue.
OPR Petition
To submit an Outstanding Professor/Researcher petition to the USCIS, ISSS requires the following:
- Copy of contract/offer letter
- Experience letters documenting that the employee has at least three years of experience in teaching and/or research in the academic field
- Experience in teaching or research while working on an advanced degree will only be acceptable if the employee earned the degree and if the teaching duties were such that they had full responsibility for the class taught or if the research conducted toward the degree has been recognized as outstanding
The international employee must also be able to provide evidence of at least two (preferably more) of the following:
- receipt of major prizes or awards for outstanding achievements in the academic field
- memberships in associations in the academic field which require outstanding achievements of their members
- published material in professional publications written by others about the individual's work in the academic field
- participation on a panel, or individually, as the judge of the work of others in the same or an allied field
- original scientific or scholarly research contributions to the academic field. These often take the form of expert opinion letters which discuss the scholar in terms of their contributions to the academic field rather than those which reflect on the scholar as a stellar graduate student or postdoctoral student
- authorship of scholarly books or articles, in scholarly journals with international circulation, in the academic field