(CLOSED) William T. Grant Scholars Program

Sponsor Name: 
William T. Grant Foundation (through Penn State Corporate & Foundation Relations)
Amount: 
$350,000.00
Description of the Award: 

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 junior researchers’ expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas. The Foundation recognizes that early-career researchers are rarely given incentives or support to take such risks, so this award includes a mentoring component, as well as an emphasis on community and collaboration.

Scholars Program applicants should have a track record of conducting high-quality research and an interest in pursuing a significant shift in their trajectories as researchers. Proposed research plans must address questions of policy and practice that are relevant to the Foundation’s focus areas.

Focus Areas

William T. Grant is focused on youth ages 5 to 25 in the United States. They fund research that increases the understanding of:

  1. programs, policies, and practices that reduce inequality in youth outcomes, and
  2. strategies to improve the use of research evidence in ways that benefit youth.

The foundation seeks research that builds stronger theory and empirical evidence in these two areas. WT Grant intends for the research supported to inform change. While the foundation does not expect that any one study will create that change, the research should contribute to a body of useful knowledge to improve the lives of young people.

Reducing Inequality Focus Area

To propose research on reducing inequality, applicants should:

  1. Clearly identify the dimension(s) of inequality to be studied (e.g., race, ethnicity, economic standing, and/or immigrant origins).
  2. Make a case for the importance of the dimension(s) of inequality.
  3. Specify the youth outcome(s) to be studied (e.g., academic, social, behavioral, and/or economic).
  4. Show that the outcomes are currently unequal.
  5. Strong proposals will establish a clear link between a particular dimension of inequality and specific youth outcomes.

Improving Research Evidence Focus Area

"Research evidence" is a type of evidence derived from applying systematic methods and analyses to address a predefined question or hypothesis. This includes descriptive studies, intervention or evaluation studies, meta-analyses, and cost-effectiveness studies conducted within or outside research organizations.

The Research Evidence focus includes:

  1. Investigations to identify, create, and test the structural and social conditions that foster more routine and constructive uses of existing research evidence.
  2. Studies to identify, create, and test the incentives, structures, and relationships that facilitate the production of new research evidence that responds to decision makers’ needs.
  3. Studies that investigate whether and under what conditions using high quality research evidence improves decision making and youth outcomes.
Sponsor Final Deadline: 
Jul 05, 2018
OSVPR Application or NOI Instructions: 

Applicants must have received their terminal degree within seven years of submitting their application. We calculate this by adding seven years to the date the doctoral degree was conferred. In medicine, the seven-year maximum is dated from the completion of the first residency.

Applicants must be in a tenure-track position.

Applicants of any discipline are eligible.

The Penn State downselect will be in 2 stages:

Stage 1: Each college/campus may select only one applicant each. All applicants should submit their applications through the psu.infoready4.com website by the 5/31/18 deadline. The Limited Submission Office will then collect the applications and distribute to the pertinent Research Dean on 6/1/2018. The colleges/campuses will oversee the review process for their college/campus, and they will select the applications to move forward to stage 2.

Stage 2: Because Penn State as an institution may submit only 1 application per ‘academic discipline’, the Office of the Vice President of Research and Corporate and Foundation Relations will determine which applications will go forward to the sponsor.

Please review the full application guidelines carefully before applying: (link above).

Requirements for the Penn State downselect (5 pages TOTAL, including CV, in ONE PDF):

1). A 5-year research plan (2 pages max) which should include:

  1. the unique contribution of the research,
  2. its significance in terms of policy and/or practice,
  3. research design and methodology,
  4. data sources and collection procedures.

2). A mentoring plan (1 page max):

  1. applicant’s current areas of expertise and the new ones that will be added during the award;
  2. the rationale for the proposed mentor(s);
  3. the mentoring activities designed to develop the new expertise;
  4. how the award will add significant value to the proposed mentoring relationship.

3). Brief CV (2 pages max).

The Office of Corporate & Foundation Relations (CFR) is the designated institutional contact responsible for communicating with the Foundation and is collaborating with Limited Submissions on the internal downselect process. Questions concerning the application process and other foundation-related questions should be directed to Heather Winfield, Associate Director of Foundation Relations (814-867-0551 or hbw11@psu.edu).

To be considered as a Penn State institutional nominee, please submit a notice of intent by the date provided directly below.
This limited submission is in downselect: 
Penn State may only submit a specific number of proposals to this funding opportunity. The number of NOIs received require that an internal competition take place, thus, a downselect process has commenced. No Penn State researchers may apply to this opportunity outside of this downselect process. To apply for this limited submission, please use this link:
OSVPR Downselect Deadline: 
Sunday, March 18, 2018 - 11:59pm