Corporate and Foundation Relations

Corporate & Foundation Relations

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.

Our office serves as a centralized resource for institutional giving. We work with Brown faculty from across the University in securing grants and other types of support from corporations and foundations.
From the sciences to the humanities, Brown is making pathbreaking strides towards discovering the answers to the big questions. Our office serves as a central liaison between philanthropic organizations and the University.

Upcoming Funding Opportunities

Robert E. Leet and Clara Guthrie Patterson Trust Mentored Research Award
Amount: $200,000 over two years

Deadline: August 14, 2025

The program supports projects and studies spanning a broad range of disciplines involving clinical research, including patient-oriented research conducted with human subjects (or on material of human origin), epidemiological and behavioral studies, outcomes research and health services research. Investigators interested in population health research that seeks to address social determinants of health and/or health inequities as a lever for improving human, health are encouraged to apply. Proposals utilizing animal studies or those with a predominant focus on fundamental aspects of phenomena without direct clinical application are ineligible.

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Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Exploring Equitable Futures
Deadline: October 15, 2025

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is taking bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime and pave the way, together, to a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.

We have set three ambitious goals for our work:

  • Economic Inclusion for Family Wellbeing
  • Equitable and Accountable Public Health and Healthcare Systems
  • Healthy and Equitable Community Conditions

Making progress toward those Generational Goals requires changing the systems that underpin our society. Currently, those systems create and uphold inequity by placing more value on some lives than others, based on race, class, and other factors. To create a more equitable future, we must identify and dismantle structural racism in our systems. We must create space for health practitioners, community leaders, and researchers to rethink the way our systems work, dream up new possibilities, and put one foot in the future to anticipate opportunities or roadblocks that future may bring.

Through our Ideas for an Equitable Future team, we support visionary thinkers—scientists, anthropologists, engineers, technologists, creatives, and others—who are imagining what the world might look like in the next 10 to 100 years.With our funding, they explore how those futures may unfold in ways that could slow down or speed up our collective efforts to dismantle structural racism and improve health equity.

By applying this future-facing lens, our grantees are uncovering how emerging social, cultural, scientific, technological, environmental, and economic trends and forces could shape the future of health for everyone. They are also discovering and experimenting with cutting-edge ideas that have the potential to tear down barriers to health and wellbeing and reinvent our systems so that they work better for us all.

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