Grants for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

The Graham Foundation makes project-based grants to individuals and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. Architecture and related spatial practices engage a wide range of cultural, social, political, technological, environmental, and aesthetic issues. The foundation is interested in projects that investigate the contemporary condition, expand historical perspectives, or explore the future of architecture and the designed environment. The foundation supports innovative, thought-provoking investigations in architecture; architectural history, theory, and criticism; design; engineering; landscape architecture; urban planning; urban studies; visual arts; and related fields of inquiry. The foundation's interest also extends to work being done in the fine arts, humanities, and sciences that expands the boundaries of thinking about architecture and space. 

Award limit: $20,000
Deadline: September 15, 2013

Read full solicitation.

Education Research Grants

Education Research Grants from the National Center for Education Research (NCER) will consider only applications that address one of the following topics: cognition and student learning; early learning programs and policies; education technology; effective teachers and effective teaching; English learners; improving education systems: policies, organization, management, and leadership; mathematics and science education; postsecondary and adult education; reading and writing; social and behavioral context for academic learning. 

Deadline: September 4, 2013
Award limit: $100,000

Read full solicitation here.

Not Safe For Funding: The NSF and the Economics of Science

Last month, Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, introduced a divisive new bill, the High Quality Research Act, that would change the criteria by which the National Science Foundation evaluates research projects and awards funding. (The N.S.F., with a budget of seven billion dollars, funds roughly twenty per cent of federally supported basic research in American universities.) Currently, proposals are evaluated through a traditional peer-review process, in which scientists and experts with knowledge of the relevant fields evaluate the projects’ “intellectual merits” and “broader impacts.” Peer review is a central tenet of modern academic science, and, according to critics, the new bill threatens to supersede it with politics.

John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said last week that “adding Congress as reviewers is a mistake.” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson warned more forcefully that Representative Smith was “sending a chilling message to the entire scientific community that peer review may always be trumped by political review.” But in a statement, Representative Smith said the draft bill “improves on [the peer-review process] by adding a layer of accountability.” The bill’s new three-point criteria for funding require that a project be “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense”; solve “problems that are of the utmost importance to society at large”; and not be “duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

Read the full The New Yorker article

Grants from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) seeks to create an environment nourished by open discourse and to empower the next generation of scholars with the necessary support to accelerate and advance new and important thinking on economic issues. INET plans to provide award grants ranging in value from $25,000 - $250,000. Grants will be awarded primarily to individuals or teams affiliated with academic institutions, think tanks, and other centers of vital research worldwide.

Scholars in economics as well as in related fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science and the physical sciences are encouraged to submit grant proposals. Submissions on any topic are welcome, however INET particularly encourages exploration on the topics listed below.

• Fundamentals of Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Management
• Behavior and the Economy
• Financial Stability
• Political Economy of Income and Wealth Distribution and Inequality Dynamics
• Innovation

 

Deadline: June 13, 2013

Award range: $25,000 - $250,000

Read full solicitation

NIJ FY 13 Research on Firearms and Violence

This solicitation by the National Institute of Justice seeks applications for research on firearms and violence such as, but not limited to, the effects of criminal justice interventions on reducing gun violence, improving data systems for studying gun violence, illicit gun markets, and the effects of firearm policies and legislation on public safety. 

Funding: 
Number of awards: 50
Total funding: $1,500,000
Award ceiling: $500,000

Deadline: May 2, 2013

Read full solicitation

William T. Grant Foundation Scholars Program

The Scholars Program supports the professional development of early-career researchers in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. The goal is to help Scholars tackle important questions that will advance theory, policy, and practice for youth and to do so with an expanded array of expertise that includes different methods, disciplinary perspectives, and content knowledge. Potential Scholars should have a promising track record of conducting high-quality research, but want to pursue a qualitative shift in their trajectory as researchers. We recognize that early-career researchers often have few supports and incentives to take measured risks. So, applicants are asked to identify areas in which they want to develop their capabilities and propose five-year research and mentoring plans to facilitate that expansion. The Foundation supports research to understand and improve the everyday settings of youth ages 8 to 25 in the United States. The Foundation funds studies that enhance our understanding of: 

1. how settings work, how they affect youth development, and how they can be improved; and 
2. when, how, and under what conditions research evidence is used in policy and practice that affect youth, and how its use can be improved. 

Award amount: $350,000 distributed over a 5-year period
Deadline: July 8, 2013

Read full solicitation

Special Grant Program in the Chemical Sciences

The Special Grant Program in the Chemical Sciences from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation provides funding for innovative projects in any area consistent with the Foundation's broad objective to advance the chemical sciences. The Foundation encourages proposals that are judged likely to significantly advance the chemical sciences. Examples of areas of interest include (but are not limited to): the increase in public awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the chemical sciences; innovative approaches to chemistry education at all levels (K-12, undergraduate, and graduate); and efforts to make chemistry careers more attractive. Research proposals are not customarily considered.

Aspects of proposals that are important are:

• broad applicability beyond the submitting institution
• specific and detailed descriptions of the chemistry associated with the proposal
• uniqueness of the project

Letter of Inquiry deadline: June 5, 2013 
Application deadline: August 21, 2013


Read full solicitation