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 Smith Family Awards Program for Excellence in Biomedical Research was created in 1991 to launch the careers of newly independent biomedical researchers with the ultimate goal of achieving medical breakthroughs. The three-year Award supports newly independent faculty engaged in basic or translational biomedical research. Investigators in the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, and engineering) whose projects focus on biomedical science are also encouraged to apply. While basic research projects involving human subjects, data, and samples are eligible, clinical trials research is beyond the scope of this program.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) invites letters of intent for Cycle 2 of the Collaborative Pairs Pilot Project Awards to support pairs of investigators and their teams to explore innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to address critical challenges in the neurodegenerative disease field and in areas of fundamental neuroscience such as the cellular, molecular and circuit mechanisms of cognition & memory and the neuroscience of sleep. The Collaborative Pairs Pilot Project Awards program was developed as a funding mechanism to catalyze new collaborations and scientific partnerships and springboard early-stage projects that are bold, creative, and “out-of-the-box." Awards are $200,000 in total costs per collaborating pair for a period of 18 months, after which successful projects will be eligible to apply for additional four-year acceleration grants that build on pilot phase studies.
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund aims to stimulate growth of new connections between scholars working in largely disconnected fields who might together change the course of climate change’s impact on human health. Over the next two years, we will dedicate $1M to supporting small, earlystage grants of $2,500 - $50,000 toward achieving this goal.
We are particularly but not exclusively interested in activities that build connections between basic/early biomedical scientific approaches and ecological, environmental, geological, geographic, and planetary-scale thinking, as well as with population-focused fields including epidemiology and public health, demography, economics, and urban planning. Also of interest is work piloting new approaches or new interactions toward reducing the impact of health-centered activities, for example, developing more sustainable systems for health care, care delivery, and biomedical research systems. Another area of interest is preparation for the impacts of extreme weather and other crises that can drive large scale disruptions that will immediately impact human health and delivery of health care. Public outreach, climate communication, and education efforts focused on the intersection of climate and health are also appropriate for this call.
The Spencer Foundation has launched a new grant program supporting transformative research projects designed to reimagine education systems for equity. Toward this end, the Vision Grants program funds the collaborative planning of innovative, methodologically diverse, interdisciplinary research on education that contributes to transforming education systems for equity. Vision Grants are research planning grants to bring together a team, for 6 to 12 months, to collaboratively develop ambitious, large-scale research projects focused on transforming educational systems toward greater equity. This program takes as core that visionary, interdisciplinary, and collaborative research projects require time, space, and thoughtfulness to incubate and plan.
While the Vision Grant program stands on its own to spark research ideas and collaborations, being awarded a Vision Grant is also a prerequisite for applying to our Transformative Research Grant program ($3.5 million), which are designed for large-scale research projects that transform education systems for equity.