The Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) works with Brown faculty and administrators to foster support for the University’s mission of research and service.
The Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) works with Brown faculty and administrators to foster support for the University’s mission of research and service.
Our team manages key institutional relationships and collaborates with corporations and foundations to advance research and other initiatives that make a positive impact on campus and in the world.
Members of Brown’s faculty and administration are invited to contact CFR for help in identifying and developing an approach to foundation and corporate funding prospects, developing proposals, coordinating campus visits, navigating the submission process, and stewarding awards.
The Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance (PSSCRA) is dedicated to accelerating cures for cancer by advancing the pursuit of innovative cancer research and by facilitating collaborations between the science and business communities. PSSCRA seeks to guide philanthropic funds to feed critical scientific discoveries, attracting like-minded investors to the cause of fighting cancer and creating a pipeline for early-stage biomedical investments.
Annually, it awards the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Prize, which provides early-career scientists in the USA the freedom to take risks and pursue their boldest research at a stage when traditional funding is lacking. In the quest for cures, the Prize accelerates the collaboration between academia and industry. Prize winners each receive $250,000 a year for three years. A minimum of six prizes will be awarded annually, depending on the quality of the proposals.
In addition to receiving funding, Prize winners are given access to a unique network and are invited to participate in select programs, including:
The ACLS Digital Justice Grant program is designed to promote and provide resources for projects at various stages of development that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues. This program supports digital projects across the humanities and interpretative social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. In this way, the program seeks to address the inequities in the distribution of access to tools and support for digital work among scholars across various fields, those working with under-utilized or understudied source materials, and those in institutions with less support for digital projects.
The program offers two kinds of grants: Digital Justice Seed Grants for projects at early stages of development; and Digital Justice Development Grants for projects that have advanced beyond the start-up or early phases of development. All grantees will have the opportunity to collaborate with the Nonprofit Finance Fund on developing a long-term financial plan for their projects.
The Small Research Grants on Education Program supports education research projects that will contribute to the improvement of education, broadly conceived, with budgets up to $50,000 for projects ranging from one to five years. We accept applications two times per year.
This program is “field-initiated” in that proposal submissions are not in response to a specific request for a particular research topic, discipline, design, method, or location. Our goal for this program is to support rigorous, intellectually ambitious and technically sound research that is relevant to the most pressing questions and compelling opportunities in education.
Scientific software is a critical component of research, enabling scientists to analyze and reduce data, perform simulations, automate tasks, and produce and visualize results. As such, the development and maintenance of broadly-applicable scientific software has become an increasingly important intellectual endeavor. While scientific software experts are crucial members of research ventures, their career prospects beyond postdoctoral-level positions are limited.
The Simons Foundation invites applications for funding to support new research professor positions (e.g., “clinical professor,” “professor of practice” or “research professor,” the titles and roles depending on the university) in existing academic departments (the “host institutions”) to be filled by scientific software-focused researchers. The SSRF Award will support researchers who have a strong track record of leadership in scientific software development. The aim of this program is to stimulate the development and maintenance of core scientific software infrastructure in academic environments through creating a new, long-term, faculty-level career path.