Application Deadline
Jun 10, 2026
- K-12 Education
- Grant Amount: $180k over three years
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The Student STEM Enrichment Program (SSEP) supports diverse programs with a common goal: to enable primary and secondary students to participate in creative, hands-on STEM activities for K-12 students and pursue inquiry-based exploration in BWF's home state of North Carolina. These awards provide up to $60,000 per year for three years. Since the program's inception in 1996, BWF has awarded 201 grants totaling $33.7 million to 103 organizations that reach more than 43,000 North Carolina students.
SSEP awards support career-oriented and practical programs intended to provide creative science enrichment activities for students in K-12 education who have shown exceptional skills and interest in STEM, as well as those perceived to have high potential. After school programs are demonstrating value in helping to close opportunity gaps for underserved and underrepresented students. These programs must enable students to participate in hands-on STEM activities and pursue inquiry-based avenues of exploration—an educational approach that BWF believes to be an effective way to increase students’ understanding and appreciation of the scientific process. To increase academic achievement, programs must provide a well-defined structure that aligns with the school-day curriculum, well-trained staff, and student follow up.
Letter of Intent Deadline
Jul 16, 2026
- Faculty
- Grant Amount: $505,000 over five years
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The Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease (PATH) program provides opportunities for assistant professors to bring multidisciplinary approaches to the study of human infectious diseases. The goal of the program is to provide opportunities for accomplished investigators at the assistant professor level to study what happens at the points where the systems of humans and potentially infectious agents connect. The program supports research that sheds light on the fundamentals that affect the outcomes of these encounters: how colonization, infection, commensalism, and other relationships play out at levels ranging from molecular interactions to systemic ones.
PATH is a highly competitive award program that provides $505,000 over a period of five years to study pathogenesis with the intent to give recipients the freedom and flexibility to pursue new avenues of inquiry, stimulating higher-risk research projects that hold potential for significantly advancing understanding of how infectious diseases work and how health is maintained.
Rolling Application Deadline
Jul 23, 2026
- Faculty, Institutions, K-12 Education, Postdoctoral Fellows, Teachers
- Grant Amount: Up to $50k
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Small grants to promote the growth of new connections between scholars, practitioners, educators, and/or communicators working to understand, spread the word about, and mitigate the impacts of climate change on human health.
Review will be conducted quarterly. After each quarterly review, we will support, decline, or send proposals back to applicants for revision, but may hold some proposals over for a future review. Recommended revisions may include suggestions that separate groups of applicants submitting similar proposals work together to develop a single proposal or that applicants consider becoming involved in efforts aligned with work funded in earlier quarters.
Letter of Intent Deadline
Aug 14, 2026
- Postdoctoral Fellows
- Grant Amount: $560,000 over five years
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BWF's Career Awards at the Scientific Interface (CASI) provide $560,000 over five years to bridge advanced postdoctoral training and the first three years of faculty service. These awards are open to U.S. and Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and temporary residents.
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund launched the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface in 1999 to foster the early career development of researchers who are transitioning from training environments in the physical, mathematical, computational sciences and/or engineering into postdoctoral work in the biological sciences, and who are dedicated to pursuing a career in academic research.
Application Deadline
Sep 30, 2026
- Teachers
- Grant Amount: $175,000 over five years
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The Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Career Award for STEM Teachers recognizes outstanding STEM teachers in the North Carolina public primary and secondary schools.
The award provides $175,000 over five years and is available to North Carolina teachers who have an outstanding performance record in educating children and who demonstrate a solid knowledge of STEM content.
This award presents opportunities for professional development and collaboration with other master science and/or mathematics teachers who will help to ensure their success as teachers and their satisfaction with the field of teaching. The award offers schools and school districts the opportunity to fully develop and empower teachers as leaders in the field.
Special consideration will be given to teachers working in hard-to-staff, economically deprived classrooms in North Carolina. Special consideration will also be given to efforts that integrate environmental science and climate change into STEM-related curricula.
The Fund and the State Board of Education recognize that improving STEM education in North Carolina will require systemic revision of K-12 instruction.
Teachers who are content-area experts and have the pedagogical skills are critical to ensuring a student’s success in understanding STEM subjects. These teachers can make a difference by serving as change agents, not only for their students but also for other educators across the state.
The largest hurdle in accomplishing these goals has been a severe shortage of STEM teachers (even beyond North Carolina’s ongoing teacher shortage). In 2015, just 13 percent of the University of North Carolina system’s 4,675 newly prepared teachers were certified in computer science/technology, science, and mathematics.