Funder: Stanford University
Due Dates (Anticipated): February 2027 (Next cycle deadline) | June 2027 (Application deadline)
Funding Amounts: Up to $25,000 for PhD students and postdocs; up to $50,000 for faculty; projects up to 12 months
Summary: Supports Stanford researchers using frontier AI to significantly improve the speed, quality, relevance, and public value of social science research.
Key Information: Funds AI-enabled research methods and workflows, not studies primarily examining AI’s effects on society.
Description
Stanford Impact Labs’ fast grants program supports novel uses of frontier AI that dramatically improve impact-focused social science. Launched in 2026, it seeks proof points that other researchers can adopt or adapt, rather than modest extensions of established methods. Projects may unlock new data, improve knowledge generation and synthesis, use agentic systems to manage research workflows, or improve how research is evaluated, replicated, translated, and used.
The call welcomes approaches using current capabilities and those anticipating substantially more capable AI. “Frontier AI” includes recent language, multimodal, vision, world-model, and agentic systems, rather than longstanding computational methods. The emphasis is AI as a tool for improving research, not studying AI’s effects on labor markets, institutions, or society. Projects developing AI-powered research methods may qualify even when their application domain touches AI adoption.
