William T. Grant Scholars Program in the US

Deadline: 1-Jul-25

The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports career development for promising early-career researchers.

The program funds five-year research and mentoring plans that significantly expand researchers’ expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas.

Focus Areas

• The Foundation supports research in two distinct focus areas:
  • Reducing Inequality 
    • In this focus area, they fund research studies that aim to build, test, or increase understanding of programs, policies, or practices to reduce inequality in the academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes of young people ages 5–25 in the United States, along dimensions of race, ethnicity, economic standing, sexual or gender minority status, language minority status, or immigrant origins.
    • Research Interests
      • The research interests in this focus area center on studies that examine ways to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. They welcome descriptive studies that clarify mechanisms for reducing inequality or elucidate how or why a specific program, policy, or practice operates to reduce inequality. They also welcome intervention studies that examine attempts to reduce inequality
      • Proposals for research on reducing inequality must:
        • Identify a specific inequality in youth outcomes.
        • Make a convincing case for the dimension(s) of inequality the study will address.
        • Articulate how findings from your research will help build, test, or increase understanding of a program, policy, or practice to reduce the specific inequality that you have identified.
  • Improving the Use of Research Evidence
    • In this focus area, they support research on strategies focused on improving the use of research evidence in ways that benefit young people ages 5-25 in the United States. They want to know what it takes to get research used by decision-makers and what happens when research is used. They welcome letters of inquiry for studies that pursue one of these broad aims.
    • Research Interests 
      • The research interests in this focus area center on studies that examine strategies to improve the use, usefulness, and impact of evidence in ways that benefit young people ages 5-25 in the United States. They welcome impact studies that test strategies for improving research use as well as whether improving research use leads to improved youth outcomes. They also welcome descriptive studies that reveal the strategies, mechanisms, or conditions for improving research use. Finally, they welcome measurement studies that explore how to construct and implement valid and reliable measures of research use.
      • In this focus area, they welcome studies that pursue one of two aims:
        • Building, identifying, or testing ways to improve the use of existing research evidence
        • Testing whether strategies that improve the use of research evidence in turn improve decision-making and youth outcomes

Funding Information

• Award recipients are designated as William T. Grant Scholars.
  • Each year, four to six Scholars are selected.
  • Each Scholar receives exactly $425,000 over five years, including up to 7.5% indirect costs.
  • Awards begin July 1 of the award year and are made to the applicant’s institution.

Eligibility Criteria

• Eligible Organizations
  • The Foundation makes grants only to tax-exempt organizations. They do not make grants to individuals.
  • They encourage proposals from organizations that are under-represented among grantee institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Alaska Native-Serving Institutions, Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions, and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions.
• Eligible Applicants
  • Applicants must be nominated by their institutions. Major divisions of an institution (e.g., College of Arts and Sciences, Medical School) may nominate only one applicant each year.
  • Applicants must have received their doctorate within seven years of submitting their application.
  • Applicants must be employed in career-ladder positions. For many applicants, this means holding a tenure-track position in a university.
  • Applicants outside the United States are eligible. As with U.S. applicants, they must pursue research that has compelling policy or practice implications for youth in the United States.
  • They strive to support a diverse group of researchers in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and seniority, and they encourage research projects led by Black or African American, Indigenous, Latinx, and/or Asian or Pacific Islander American researchers.

For more information, visit William T. Grant Foundation.