The Office of Foundation Relations has identified private foundation funding opportunities of interest to the Hopkins community. While this list is not intended to be exhaustive, it provides a range of opportunities across academic disciplines.
We encourage faculty and researchers to contact us at [email protected] if interested in applying for any of the opportunities listed below. We would be happy to learn about your work and discuss potential strategies for securing foundation support. We can provide background on individual foundations, guidance on developing competitive proposals and endorsement letters, and serve as a liaison to program officers.
Please note, some foundations require that any approach for funding be made through our office and some limit the number of proposals received from Johns Hopkins University in a given grant cycle. In some cases, Johns Hopkins has maintained long-standing institutional relationships with key funders. To help identify those foundations that merit a more strategic approach, our office maintains a list of centrally managed foundations. We strongly encourage contacting our team before communicating with or submitting a proposal/letter of inquiry to those selected foundations.
| wdt_ID | Submission Deadline | Opportunity | Sponsor | Maximum Award Amount | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | |||||
| 167 | Rolling | Pioneering Ideas Grants | Robert Wood Johnson Foundation | $315,031 | Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Pioneering Ideas Grants seeks proposals that are primed to impact health equity moving forward. The foundation is interested in ideas that address any of their four areas of focus: Future of Evidence; Future of Social Interaction; Future of Food; Future of Work. They may also support research outside of these areas, as long it offers a unique approach to advancing health equity and contributes to the foundation's Culture of Health. While there is not an explicit range for budget requests, the average grant during the 2019 cycle was for $315,031. |
| 173 | Early October and March 1st for Spring and Fall Respectively | Scialog | Research Corporation for Science Advancement | $60,000 | Science Dialogs (Scialog) are a series of annual meetings hosted by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement for which early-career faculty can self-nominate themselves as participants. The annual meetings bring together around 50 Fellows (faculty from their first year through soon after tenure) across disciplines and who employ a range of methodologies along with 10 Facilitators (senior faculty who guide the discussions) over 3 days, with the goal of launching innovative, collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that the corporation and their foundation partners support with one-year grants of $60,000 in direct costs per Fellow on each funded team. The 2024 meetings are set to take place in April, September, and November with themes including AI, sustainable materials, and astrophysics. |
| 184 | Varies | Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real-World Tasks | Open Philanthropy | $3,000,000 | In order to help build scientific understanding of the near-term impacts of large language models (LLM) like GTP-4, Open Philanthropy is looking to fund benchmarks that measure how close LLM agents can get to performing consequential real-world tasks. Specifically, when they will be able to replace or outperform humans in professions which account for a large share of the labor market, cause large scale economic or physical destruction, or hugely accelerate the pace of technological R&D. Grants are expected range from $300,000 to 3 million over 6 months to 2 years. |
| 196 | None | Causal Research on Community Safety and the Criminal Justice System | Arnold Ventures | $500,000 | Arnold Ventures' Criminal Justice Initiative seeks research that will build credible evidence on policies, practices, and interventions that can improve crime and justice system outcomes and grow the number of policies and practices shown to produce improvements in community safety and to make the justice system fairer and more effective. There is no deadline for submitting a letter of interest; applicants may submit a letter of interest at any time via email to [email protected]. While there is no budget ceiling, there is a median budget of $500,000. |
| 197 | Rolling | Medical Educational Grants | Bayer Corporation | Variable | Bayer Corporation is taking grant requests for medical education research on a variety of topics including Hematology, Women's Health, Cardiovascular and Renal, and Oncology. Details regarding the specifics of each opportunity, including budget, can be found through the link above. |
| 206 | Quarterly | Research Grants | Abiomed | Variable | Abiomed funds research that investigates how mechanical circulatory support with Impella® heart pumps may improve patient outcomes. Areas of interest include Best Practices in Urgent Patient Populations, Long Duration Impella Support for Heart Recovery, Cardiac Surgery, and End Organ Protection with Impella. All types of research programs will be considered, including, but not limited to: clinical studies and pre-clinical investigations. Research proposals are reviewed quarterly, and award amounts vary. |
| 251 | 01/29/2025 | Sleep Contributions to Neurodegeneration Grant Program | Alzheimer's Association | $500,000 | The Alzheimer’s Association, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) and CurePSP are partnering together on this unique funding program to advance an understanding of the role sleep plays in neurodegeneration, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body diseases and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. This funding call will focus on projects aimed to advance our understanding of the impact that sleep and related biology (including circadian rhythms) have as both a contributor to and a consequence of neurodegeneration. The maximum grant amount for this opportunity is $500,000. |
| 252 | 02/03/2025 | Prevention RFP | Alzheimer's Drug Discovery | $5,000,000 | The ADDF seeks to support precision prevention studies, combination therapy studies, and comparative effectiveness research that probe whether the use or choice of interventions may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias. The foundation will consider funding programs that target and treat people with specific risk factors with the goal of modifying their dementia risk, as measured by outcomes related to dementia (e.g., cognitive function, neuroimaging outcomes, fluid biomarkers, and others). Awards will be up to $5,000,000 for clinical trials based on stage and scope of research. |
| 253 | 02/06/2025 | Reimagining Land Use & Zoning for Health Equity | Robert Wood Johnson Foundation | $250,000 | The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Communities portfolio seeks to provide grants to organizations and communities that are actively working to reimagine land use and zoning as tools for advancing healthy, thriving, and equitable communities. This call for proposals is designed to identify and support existing and ongoing work that is in the demonstration (pilot), implementation, or evaluation stage, rather than concept, startup, or initiation phases. One focus of this work is creating equitable approaches to how communities are planned, revitalized, and built. Each award will be $250,000. |
Last updated: January 30, 2024
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