Grant Programs
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Grants Guide
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s overall grantmaking strategy is to support biomedical scientists at the beginning of their careers and to make grants in areas of science that are poised for significant advancement but currently undervalued and underfunded. Within this overall strategy, BWF makes grants within seven focus areas:
Population and Laboratory Based Sciences
BWF has programs which support primary and secondary students, science and mathematics teachers, institutions, and academic scientists: postdoctoral-faculty bridging awards, and faculty awards.
The majority of the BWF ’s grantmaking is through competitive award programs. Most awards are made to degree-granting institutions in the United States and Canada on behalf of individual researchers, who must be nominated by their institution. All institutions receiving awards must be tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations.
To apply for the competitive award programs, select the program above and follow the guidelines and application requirements.
To complement these competitive award programs, we also make modest grants on an "ad hoc" basis to nonprofit organizations conducting activities intended to improve the general environment for science. These noncompetitive grants are for activities closely related to our focus areas identified above.
awards supporting primary and secondary students
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is committed to supporting science education for primary and secondary students and has partnered with various organizations to help develop an infrastructure for improving science, mathematics, and technology education across North Carolina.
Student Science Enrichment Program
These awards are trageted for career-oriented and practical programs intended to provide creative science enrichment activities for students in K-12 education who have shown exceptional skills and invest in science and mathematics, as well as those perceived to have high potential.
awards supporting academic scientists
Awards for Postdoctoral Fellows
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is committed to supporting the early careers of promising scientists. Toward this end, BWF has developed two programs that are designed for advanced postdoctoral scientists to help make the transition to a faculty appointment:
Career Awards for Medical Scientists
These awards are targeted toward medically trained individuals whose research proposal is in basic biomedical, disease-oriented, translational, or molecular, genetic, or pharmacological epidemiology research, and who intend to pursue careers in academia.
Career Awards at the Scientific Interface
These awards are targeted toward researchers whose doctoral training is in one of the physical, chemical or computational sciences and who intend to pursue academic research doing work that addresses biological questions.
Awards for Faculty
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has three programs for which faculty of degree-granting institutions in the United States and Canada are eligible:
Clinical Scientist Awardsin Translational Research
These awards are targeted toward established, independent late assistant or associate professors whose work bridges the gap between basic research and patient care. The awards are intended to give recipients the freedom and flexibility to explore fundamental scientific questions, to apply the resulting knowledge at the bedside, and to bring insights from the clinical setting back to the laboratory for further exploration.
Investigators in Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases
These awards are targeted toward assistant professors for the study of pathogenesis, with a focus on the intersection of human and pathogen biology. The program is intended to shed light on the overarching issues of how human hosts handle infectious challenge.
These awards are targeted toward faculty whose work will increase the understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying parturition and spontaneous preterm birth. This program is also intended to bring together a diverse interdisciplinary group with expertise in genetics/genomics, immunology, microbiology, and proteomics along with the more traditional areas of parturition research such as maternal fetal medicine, obstetrics, and pediatrics to address the scientific issues related to preterm birth.
Awards for Institutions
Institutional Program Unifying Population and Laboratory Based Sciences
These awards are targeted toward institutions which provide training to bridge the gap between the population and computational sciences and the laboratory-based biological sciences. The award will support the training of researchers between existing concentrations of research strength in population approaches to human health and in basic biological sciences. The goal is to establish training programs by partnering researchers working in schools of medicine and schools (or academic divisions) of public health.
Awards for Teachers
Career Award for Science and Mathematics Teachers
These awards are targeted towards outstanding Science and Mathematics teachers in the North Carolina public K-12 schools.