Career Awards for STEM Teachers

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.

Career Awards for Medical Scientists

The Career Awards for Medical Scientists (CAMS) is a highly competitive program that provides $700,000 awards over five years for physician-scientists, who are committed to an academic career, to bridge advanced postdoctoral/fellowship training and the early years of faculty service.

Climate Change and Human Health Seed Grants

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.

Career Guidance for Trainees

BWF’s Career Guidance for Trainees program this year will offer a career development workshop for early career administrators whose work focuses on the career development of PhD scientists. The workshop will focus on developing participants’ research evaluation skills while creating new career-focused interventions or activities for use at the participants’ home institutions. In the year following the workshop, participants will each develop their research and evaluation networks, develop and run their project with support from a $15,000 grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, submit their results for presentation at a national meeting, and rigorously prepare a manuscript for publication.

Applications for a seat in the workshop are due May 11.

Climate + Health Excellence (CHEX) Centers

New institutional awards of up to $10,000,000 to stimulate development of strong research, education, and public communications connections between fields that aim to understand and mitigate the impact of climate change on human health. In general, this award will support institutions or consortia that are already moving toward establishing themselves as centers of excellence for understanding climate change’s impact on human health and for leadership in climate education OR public communication around climate and health. Applications from institutions just starting to integrate Climate + Health into their planning are expected to be uncompetitive. Up to three awards will be made over two rounds of competition.

Providing support for U.S. and Canadian research and educational Institutions or consortia of research and educational institutions.