Deadline: June 30, 2026
Applications for the William T. Grant Scholars Program 2026 are now open. 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.
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.
Awards
- 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.
- The award must not replace the institution’s current support of the applicant’s research.
Eligibility
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.
Organisations
- 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.
Application
Click here for application resources
For more information, visit William T. Grant Scholars Program.
