Funder: Simons Foundation
Due Dates: January 13, 2027, at noon Eastern time (Full application)
Funding Amounts: Faculty award: $200,000 annually for three years; optional postdoctoral award: $110,000 annually for up to two years
Summary: Supports mentored doctoral scientists transitioning to independent laboratories in autism research, brain plasticity and aging, or ecological neuroscience.
Key Information: Applicants must not accept a formal tenure-track faculty offer or equivalent before award notification.
Description
The Simons Foundation’s Autism & Neuroscience division offers this award to help early-career scientists move from mentored research positions into independent laboratories. It supports scientific visions aligned with the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), the Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Aging Brain (SCPAB), or the Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE).
The program prioritizes high-risk, high-reward basic science with transformative potential, emphasizing a future laboratory’s research vision rather than a single three-year project. Human studies and other experimental systems are welcome, including clinical, theoretical and computational expertise newly applied to these fields. SFARI focuses on autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders; SCPAB investigates resilience and functional maintenance in healthy cognitive aging; SCENE studies how interactions with the world are represented in the brain. This is the final SCPAB request for applications.
