William T. Grant Scholars Program in United States

Deadline: 03-Jul-24

The William T. Grant Foundation is currently accepting submissions for William T. Grant Scholars Program to support 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.

Applicants should have a track record of conducting high-quality research and an interest in pursuing a significant shift in their trajectories as researchers. They recognize that early-career researchers are rarely given incentives or support to take measured risks in their work, so this award includes a mentoring component, as well as a supportive academic community.

Focus Areas

• The Foundation supports research in two distinct focus areas: 1) Reducing inequality in youth outcomes, and 2) Improving the use of research evidence by in policy and practice.
  • Focus Area1: 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, 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. Finally, they welcome studies that improve the measurement of inequality in ways that can enhance the work of researchers, practitioners, or policy-makers.
      • 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.
  • Focus Area2: Improving the Use of Research Evidence 
    • In this focus area, they fund research studies that advance theory and build empirical knowledge on ways to improve the use of research evidence by policymakers, agency leaders, organizational managers, intermediaries, and other decision-makers that shape youth-serving systems in the United States. While an extensive body of knowledge provides a rich understanding of specific conditions that foster the use of research evidence, they lack robust, validated strategies for cultivating them. What is required to create structural and social conditions that support research use? What infrastructure is needed, and what will it look like? What supports and incentives foster research use? And, ultimately, how do youth outcomes fare when research evidence is used? This is where new research can make a difference.
    • 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 three aims:
        • Building, identifying, or testing ways to improve the use of existing research evidence
        • Building, identifying, or testing ways to facilitate the production of new research evidence that responds to decision-makers’ needs
        • 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 $350,000 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. In addition to the eligibility criteria below, deans and directors of those divisions should refer to the Review Criteria to aid them in choosing their nominees. Applicants of any discipline are eligible.
  • Applicants must have received their doctorate within seven years of submitting their application. They calculate this by adding seven to the year the doctorate was conferred. In medicine, the seven-year maximum is dated from the completion of the first residency. The month in which the degree was conferred or residency completed does not matter for this calculation.
  • Applicants must be employed in career-ladder positions. For many applicants, this means holding a tenure-track position in a university. Applicants in other types of organizations should be in positions in which there is a pathway to advancement in a research career at the organization and the organization is fiscally responsible for the applicant’s position. The award may not be used as a post-doctoral fellowship.
  • 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.