Defining Your ‘Field’ For Purposes of an EB-1 (Extraordinary Ability, Outstanding Researcher or Outstanding Professor) or an O-1
August 7th, 2014 by SRW Lawyers
Both of these categories carry similar evidentiary requirements in that the foreign national must display that they are an individual of extraordinary ability within their field by satisfying the statutory criteria set forth and for EB-1 purposes, satisfying an overall ‘final merits determination’. However – one of the first challenges that applicants and their attorneys must overcome is actually defining the academic field – use too broad of a field and the applicant may just appear to be another face in the crowd or use to narrow of a field and it is hard to encompass all of the applicants achievements in their career. For example, for an EB-1 Outstanding Researcher Petition for an Senior Researcher for an Architectural Design company, we focused on her field to architectural research and design of healthcare facilities. For a Mathematics Professor, we focused his specialty on Probability. For an applicant who had used his research expertise in a different industry (hair care research) but was applying for an EB-1 Outstanding Researcher Petition for another industry (gemological research), we focused on the skillset he carried across the industry- Photonics & Optical Technology. For an O-1 clinician whose specialty was endocrinology, we focused on his sub-specialty of diabetes and defined his field as Diabetes Endocrinology. Defining the ‘field’ as concisely as possible is imperative to constructing a strong petition and laying the foundation to demonstrate that the applicant meets the statutory criteria for the classification being sought.
