Funding Opportunities
Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) - 7/13/26 Pre-application Deadline
Goals: Fund research to understand, prevent, and treat psychological health conditions and/or traumatic brain injuries (TBI). The program accelerates impactful solutions, clinical healthcare products, and practice guidelines to improve the health and healthcare of Service Members, their Families, Veterans, and the American public.
Budget: $2.1M to $4.1M in total costs depending on the specific mechanism and research level.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
Russell Sage Foundation - 7/15/26 LOI deadline (various programs)
- Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context seeks to further our understanding of economic, social, political, and psychological decision-making processes, attitudes, behaviors, and institutional practices in public and private contexts such as policing/criminal legal systems, employment, housing, politics, racial/ethnic relations, and immigration.
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration supports innovative investigator-initiated research that examines the roles of race, ethnicity, nativity, legal status —and their interactions with each other and other social categories—in the social, economic, and political outcomes for immigrants, U.S.-born racial and ethnic minorities, and native-born whites.
- Immigration and Immigrant Integration seeks to support innovative research on the effects of race, citizenship, legal status and politics, political culture and public policy on outcomes for immigrants and for the native-born of different racial and ethnic groups of generations.
Award amounts: The maximum grant amount for a Trustee grant is $200,000, including 15% indirect costs. Grants up to $75,000 are considered Presidential-Authority grants.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
Templeton Foundation - 7/15/26 Funding Inquiry Deadline
- Character Virtue Development: For projects studying or cultivating moral, civic, performance, or intellectual virtues such as humility, gratitude, curiosity, diligence, honesty, agency, and practical wisdom.
- Individual Freedom & Free Markets: For research, education, outreach, or ventures grounded in classical liberal political economy, individual freedom, free markets, entrepreneurship, civil society, or institutional reform.
- Public Engagement: For content, events, media, thought leadership, or campus programming that brings Templeton-aligned ideas to broad public audiences; 2026 content proposals should align with the Intelligence Venture.
- Religion, Science & Society: For interdisciplinary research on intelligence, meaning-making, or imagined futures, especially where religious, philosophical, theological, social scientific, or cultural questions intersect.
- Ventures — Intelligence: For projects exploring the nature, purpose, diversity, plurality, or future of intelligence across human, biological, collective, artificial, philosophical, theological, and scientific domains.
Funding amounts: Awards vary by project and program; Templeton generally supports discrete project grants, often up to three years. The 2026 Intelligence Venture will award more than $60 million across the foundation’s funding areas over three years, and Religion, Science & Society lists ranges from focused studies under $260K to larger collaborative projects up to $2.5M, depending on topic.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) - 7/17/26 Proposal Deadline
The purpose of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is to invite applications proposing innovative analysis of existing social science, behavioral, administrative, and neuroimaging data to study the etiology and epidemiology of substance using behaviors and related disorders, prevention of substance use and HIV, and health service utilization. Primary data collection is not allowed for applications in response to this NOFO.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
WT Grant Foundation - 7/29/26 LOI Deadline
WT Grant has two primary grant programs, Research Grants on Reducing Inequality and Research Grants on Improving the Use of Research Evidence. They announced that they will only have two LOI deadlines this year, January 7 and July 29.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
NBER - 7/31/26 Proposal Deadline
To support the launch of research projects on economic measurement, the Economic Measurement Research Institute (EMRI) at NBER, with the support of the National Science Foundation, invites proposals for small data acquisition grants. Economic measurement can include price measurement, national or regional income and product measures, employment and wage statistics, technology indicators, and a range of other economic measurement topics. Funding range will be between $2,500 and $7,500 and may only be used to cover costs associated with data purchases, including subscriptions to data providers.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship - 9/10/26 Application Deadline
The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program offers scientists, writers, scholars, public intellectuals, and artists a chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full academic year in a vibrant interdisciplinary setting amid the resources of Harvard University.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
Role of Work in Health Disparities in the US (NIH PAR-25-292) - 10/5/26 Deadline
The main objective of this initiative is to determine the extent and mechanisms by which work as a social determinant of health (SDOH) both contributes to, and helps improve, health and health care disparities. Projects must include a focus on one or more of the NIH-designated populations that experience health disparities in the United States. Can involve primary data collection or analysis of existing datasets. Projects may utilize observational studies, natural experiments, quasi-experiments, simulation modeling, as well as use of large-scale longitudinal data sets, data mining techniques, registries, surveillance data, and linking to administrative data sets.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Overview and Application Information
Smith Richardson Foundation - Rolling LOI Deadline
Funding is available for junior faculty. Award amounts range from $50,000-$600,000.
International Security and Foreign Policy Program is to assist the U.S. policy community in developing effective national security strategies and foreign policies. The Foundation is committed to supporting projects that help the policy community face the fundamental challenge of ensuring the security of the United States, protecting and promoting American interests and values abroad, and enhancing international order.
Domestic Public Policy Program supports projects that will help the public and policy makers understand and address critical challenges facing the United States. To that end, the Foundation supports research on and evaluation of existing public policies and programs, as well as projects that inject new ideas into public debates.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Arnold Ventures - Rolling LOI Deadline
Arnold Ventures' Criminal Justice Initiative seeks to generate new evidence to inform policies that will make communities safer and make the criminal justice system more fair and effective. This Request for Proposals (RFP) from the Criminal Justice Initiative (CJI) seeks letters of interest to conduct causal research projects of policies, practices, and interventions related to community safety and the criminal justice system. Award amount is $500,000 over 3-4 years.
To be eligible to submit through this funding opportunity, research projects must adhere to the following criteria:
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Propose a strong causal research design, which can reliably and validly isolate the treatment effect of a policy, practice, or intervention. Examples of such research designs include difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variable, and randomization.
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The policy, practice, or intervention being tested is in the United States.
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Outcomes include measures of real-world behaviors (such as crime rates or criminal justice involvement), as opposed to measures collected in a controlled lab setting or measures of perceptions.
Mental Research Institute - Rolling LOI Deadline
The Mental Research Institute provides grants to fund research projects that use an interactional approach to facilitate healthy relationships.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Commonwealth Fund - Rolling LOI Deadline
The Commonwealth Fund funds research on health care issues and makes grants to improve health care practice and policy. They also fund international research that can provide insights to spur change in U.S. health care.
If interested, please contact Heather Frey (hfrey@nd.edu).
Summary of Deadlines
- 7/13/26: CDMRP
- 7/15/26: Russell Sage
- 7/15/26: Templeton Foundation
- 7/17/26: National Institute on Drug Abuse
- 7/29/26: WT Grant Foundation
- 7/31/26: NBER
- 9/10/26: Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship
- 10/5/26: NIH
- Rolling: Arnold Ventures Criminal Justice Initiative
- Rolling: Smith Richardson Foundation
- Rolling: Mental Health Research Institute
- Rolling: Commonwealth Fund