Pipeline Grants Competition

Overview

The Pipeline Grants Competition seeks to support early-career scholars (Assistant Professors, Lecturers and Adjunct Assistant Professors) and promote diversity by prioritizing applications from scholars who are underrepresented in the social sciences and/or employed at under-resourced colleges and universities. This includes racial, ethnic, gender, disciplinary, institutional, and geographic diversity.

The primary goal of the Pipeline Grants Competition is to support innovative research on economic mobility and access to opportunity in the United States. We are also interested in research focused on structural barriers to educational attainment, economic mobility, political and civic engagement, and how individuals, communities and state entities understand, navigate and challenge systemic inequalities.

Below we provide some examples of topics and questions that are relevant to this competition. This list is not all-encompassing. Short descriptions of previously funded projects are available on our website.

Our priorities generally exclude research focused on health​ or mental health outcomes or health behaviors, ​as these are priorities for other funders. ​For the same reason, RSF seldom supports research focused on educational processes or curricular issues. It does prioritize analyses of the causes and consequences of inequities in student achievement or educational attainment.

RSF has a long-standing goal of encouraging methodological diversity and inter-disciplinary collaboration. We are interested in novel uses of new or under-utilized data, and creative uses of administrative data or new data linkages across systems (e.g., in and across criminal justice, safety net, labor markets). Applicants might propose exploratory fieldwork, a pilot study, field or survey experiments, in-depth qualitative interviews, ethnographies, and/or pilot or exploratory studies which support the development of a randomized evaluation (randomized controlled trial).

Areas of Interest: 

• Income & Wealth
• Policy Impacts and Interventions
• Neighborhood Characteristics, Gentrification and Segregation
• Climate Change & Natural Disasters
• Criminal Justice & the Legal System
• Young Adults of Color, Social Movements, and Democracy
• Accessing the Safety Net
• Labor Markets
• Immigrants, Immigration, and Immigrant Integration Policies
• Education
• Gender, Work and Public Policies

Only faculty who have not previously received a research grant or a visiting fellowship from RSF are eligible to apply. 

Applicants can apply for either the Pipeline Grants Competition or the October LOI deadline for presidential and trustee grants, but not both.

RSF expects to fund about 20 one-year projects by assistant professors, lecturers, and adjunct assistant professors. Individual applicants can apply for grants of up to $35,000; teams of two or more eligible applicants can apply for grants of up to $50,000. RSF will pair grantees with mentors conducting research on related issues and provide an honorarium for the mentors. On occasion, RSF will deem a project or applicant more appropriate for its Presidential Grants Competition and review a Pipeline Grants proposal as a letter of inquiry for that competition instead.

Grantees are expected to present their findings at a conference at the end of the one-year grant, where other grantees, mentors, and other senior scholars will participate.