Limited Submission Opportunities

The Schmidt Science Polymaths Program supports recently tenured faculty with extraordinary track records and bold, creative visions for exploring entirely new lines of research that are clearly distinct from their prior work. These grants are designed for “polymath” researchers, those who cross disciplinary boundaries and apply insights in unconventional ways, to pursue high-risk, underexplored ideas unlikely to receive traditional funding.
The program invests in individuals, not specific projects, and seeks candidates who are intensely creative, willing to take adventurous leaps, and capable of generating transformative breakthroughs. Successful nominees are not simply excellent scientists—they exhibit high-variance thinking, a strong desire to pivot into new research domains, and the courage to test “big if true” ideas. Proposals should reflect future research directions and describe the kinds of questions they want to explore if traditional constraints were removed.

Managing Unit: VPDoR

Through the Workforce Awards, Natcast will invest in semiconductor industry-related training and educational supports for American workers to help close workforce and skills gaps in the United States for researchers, engineers, and technicians involved in semiconductor design, manufacturing, and production.

Managing Unit: VPDoR

The overall objective of the forestry program is to improve sustainable forest management that addresses the pressing problems of climate change and biodiversity loss as well as society’s need for forest products.
– The program shall contribute to a change of perspective in sustainable forest management and in the use and value of forests.
– The program shall contribute to the integration of evidence-based science into forestry practice.
– Financial innovation and improved framework conditions should provide leverage for the implementation of sustainable forest management, resulting in forests that can conserve biodiversity, act as a carbon sink and supply forest products.
Thematic focus:
– Innovative and integrative sustainable forest management to develop and provide solutions for adapting to or mitigating climate change, promoting biodiversity, providing resilient ecosystems services and supplying sustainable forest products.
– Incentives or tools for action and behavioural change towards sustainable forest management by transforming theoretical and abstract values of forest products and services.

Managing Unit: VPDoR

The Mark Foundation Endeavor Awards support collaborative research projects that bring together investigators with diverse areas of expertise to tackle challenges in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. These grants are awarded to teams of three or more investigators to generate and integrate data from diverse lines of research and transform those insights into advances for cancer patients that could not be achieved by individual efforts. Basic, translational, and clinical projects are eligible.

Managing Unit: SoM

$550,000 limited submission funding opportunity for early career biomedical scholars. Stanford Assistant Professors with UTL, UML, NTLR appointments in the early years of their tenure track faculty appointments from any school may be nominated. The Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Program funds biomedical research in the fields of cancer, immunology, and neuroscience. Candidates must have completed their training and provided persuasive evidence of distinguished achievement or extraordinary promise in research in one of the relevant fields.

Managing Unit: SoM

The CHEX Centers award is a new institutional research and training grant. It aims to bridge fields to understand and mitigate climate change's health impacts. The grant supports discovery, intervention development, science translation, public engagement, and community connections. The goal is to help Centers of Excellence build stable, interdisciplinary collaborations across scholars, departments, and institutions.

Managing Unit: VPDoR

The Foundation primarily supports basic science research with translational potential that can lead to major advances in scientific understanding and human health. Examples of current research areas supported include immunology, microbiome, structural biology, cellular physiology, cancer biology, genetics, genomics, microbiology and infectious diseases, stem cell biology, and neuroscience. Research areas that will not be considered for support include Covid-19 , plant biology, oceanography, space exploration, global warming, agriculture and herbicide research, clinical trials or drug discovery*, vaccine development, ecology, and environment. *The foundation’s guidance on human subjects research suggests using the NIH human subject research decision-making tool to evaluate your project.

Managing Unit: SoM

The Foundation is seeking highly innovative and groundbreaking medical research proposals from top-tier institutions in both basic biological and applied research that will have the greatest impact on scientific knowledge and human health. Proposals should be distinctive and novel in their approaches, question the prevailing paradigm, and lead to the advancement of knowledge in the field. A highly qualified scientific advisory committee will review all proposals.

Funding is highly competitive; therefore, the Foundation Directors strive to select projects and programs where funding will have the greatest impact.

Medical areas of interest include the following: Allergy and Immunology, Biochemistry, Cardiology, Dermatology, Dietetics, Embryology, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Genetics, Hepatology, Immunology, Infectious Disease, Nephrology, Neurology, Oncology, Ophthalmology, Personalized Medicine, Psychiatry, Pulmonology, Rheumatology, Toxicology.

Managing Unit: SoM

Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and LUT University recently established the Global Climate Research Prize, a new international, biennial award recognizing outstanding research that deepens our understanding of climate change and its wide-ranging impacts. Open to researchers at any career stage, the prize honors published work of exceptional quality with transformative, cross-disciplinary, and global relevance. Its broad scope spans fields from atmospheric physics to cultural history and literature.

Managing Unit: VPDoR

The Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence program supports the creation of new interdisciplinary centers that explore the social and cultural dimensions of AI through a humanities lens. Proposed centers must focus on a specific topic related to AI’s societal implications—such as ethics, law, history, or civil rights—and demonstrate how this work can inform the United States’ leadership in AI. Each center should involve sustained collaboration among multiple scholars and pursue at least two scholarly activities, such as research initiatives, educational programming, conferences, or tool development. Projects must include a dissemination plan and are expected to have a long-term vision that outlasts the grant period.

Managing Unit: VPDoR

The Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics is a career development award to enable early-career faculty members to carry out innovative bioethics research. It supports research that goes beyond current work in bioethics to help resolve pressing ethical issues in clinical, biomedical, and public health decision-making, policy, and practice, and creates a community that enhances future bioethics research by Scholars and Alums.

Faculty Scholars will be selected on the basis of the strength of their research project, their commitment to the field of bioethics, their achievements, their potential for growth as a bioethics scholar, and support from their home institution, including after the end of this award. While the amount and quality of an applicant’s research in bioethics will count favorably towards their application, outstanding candidates with less direct experience in bioethics will also be considered when their proposed work aims to advance the bioethics field.

Managing Unit: VPDoR

The purpose of the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation 2026 Research Grants Program is to help prepare and support new investigators at the Assistant Professor level as they begin their careers. The foundation seeks to fund basic life science research (not clinical nor applied) addressing fundamental scientific questions that, when answered, will lead to significant advances in medicine or scientific knowledge.

Managing Unit: SoM