Corporate Engagement and Foundation Relations

Corporate Engagement and Foundation Relations

The Office of Corporate Engagement and Foundation Relations (CEFR) advances Brown’s mission of education, research, and service by cultivating strategic collaborations with corporations and foundations.

Our team connects external partners and Brown’s leading-edge research and world-class talent. CEFR facilitates high-impact institutional collaborations to enrich learning and research, accelerate innovation, and drive economic and societal impact.

Brown faculty and staff are invited to contact CEFR for support in working with institutional partners, including developing competitive proposals, coordinating campus engagement, navigating the submission process, and stewarding awards.

How We Can Support You

Discover how our team partners with Brown faculty to identify funding opportunities, create competitive proposals, and secure research funding.
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Explore funding opportunities, corporate partnerships, and foundation relations dedicated to faculty in the Division of Biology and Medicine, The Warren Alpert Medical School, and Brown University Health.
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Upcoming Funding Opportunities

Amazon Research Awards 

Deadline: November 4, 2026

Amount: up to $100,000

An opportunity for eligible academic and nonprofit researchers to pursue support for research aligned with Amazon’s current technical priorities. The program supports academic and nonprofit research in nine areas.

  • Agentic AI
  • AI for Information Security
  • Amazon Security
  • Automated Reasoning
  • AWS Cryptography
  • Build on Trainium: Agentic, Recursive Improvement of Kernels and Frameworks
  • Multilingual and Contextual AI Evaluation
  • On-Device Multimodal Perception
  • Synthetic Data Generation for Multimodal Perception

Awards are structured as unrestricted gifts to the recipient’s institution or organization. Amazon retains no intellectual property rights to resulting work and recipients are encouraged to publish outcomes and contribute related code to open-source repositories.

Eligible applicants include full-time faculty members at accredited academic institutions and permanent researchers at qualifying nonprofits. Each principal investigator may submit one proposal during the call period.

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Rockefeller Foundation and OpenAI Foundation: Cities Deliver: AI Solutions for Public Services

Deadline: November 29, 2026

Nearly half of the world’s population lives in cities. Public services shape those residents’ everyday lives. They affect whether they can get health care, find meaningful work, live safely, and have a voice in local decisions. City governments and their partners are on the front lines of delivering these public services.

Artificial intelligence now offers new ways to meet these needs. AI can help residents access services, anticipate problems before they become crises, and respond to resident needs more effectively. Putting these capabilities to work requires solutions built around residents’ needs and developed in partnership with city governments.

The Rockefeller Foundation and OpenAI Foundation are committing $50 million to Cities Deliver to support this work. The initiative will provide grants of $500,000 to $2 million to organizations working with city governments to improve public services through AI, especially for underserved communities. Together, these projects will aim to reach up to 100 million city residents worldwide.

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Russell Sage Foundation: Margaret Olivia Sage (MOS) Grants

Deadline: November 30, 2026 (Letter of Inquiry)

Amount: varies

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) is launching a new competition, the Margaret Olivia Sage (MOS) Grants, to support research by multi- or inter-disciplinary teams on social, economic, and political challenges with generational consequences for social and living conditions in the United States. Such challenges are typically national in scope, involve both systemic and individual factors, and the questions they raise are as urgent for policymakers and communities as they are for researchers. Exemplifying the scope and ambition of MOS projects, we have identified four current priority areas for support: (1) democracy, (2) the societal impacts of artificial intelligence, (3) inequality and affordability, and (4) data infrastructure for social science research.

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Simons Foundation: Targeted Grants in MPS

Deadline: Rolling (Letter of Intent)

Amount: varies 

The program is intended to support high-risk theoretical mathematics, physics and computer science projects of exceptional promise and scientific importance on a case-by-case basis. PIs and co-Investigators (co-Is) must hold a tenured or tenure-track faculty, or equivalent, position at said eligible institutions or centers, outlined below, at the time of application and for the duration of the award. There are no restrictions on the department and/or discipline of the PIs/co-Is. PIs and co-Is may be from non-U.S. institutions. A co-I must be employed by or be affiliated with a PI institution or another organization participating in the project under a consortium agreement.

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