Greetings,
We are excited to share this funding opportunity from the Pathways for Health Research Collective (the Collective). The Collective is seeking bold, rigorous projects that can improve health outcomes in the United States. More information about the award can be found in the synopsis and links below. For a full list of currently open opportunities that have been announced through our office, please visit our Current Opportunities web page. As a reminder, our Research Development team is available to provide proposal development support to FAS ladder faculty.
- OSP Pre-proposal Deadline: November 13, 2026 at 9:00 AM ET
Departments or areas may require additional time for proposal review and submission. Please discuss a timeline with your grants administrator.
- Sponsor Pre-proposal Deadline: November 18, 2026 at 3:00 PM ET
- Award Amount: The Collective is open to a range of budget requests. Grants are expected to complement, not fully fund, a project's complete scope of work. Projects should also leverage financial or in-kind commitments from partners. A feasible three-year plan is required.
Indirect costs up to 10% are allowed. This falls short of the 15% overhead required by FAS/SEAS policy. Please discuss this with your grants administrator before preparing an application.
Program Overview
The Doris Duke Foundation, together with American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Dana Foundation, Donaghue Foundation, Prebys Foundation, Robertson Foundation, Susan G. Komen and additional philanthropic partners are the Collective to Strengthen Pathways for Health Research. The Collective is seeking bold, rigorous projects that can improve health outcomes in the United States; specifically, projects ready to build on promising evidence, measure meaningful change in real-world settings, and inform innovations in policy, process, or practice. Health is shaped by where we live, learn, work, age, and connect with one another. Behavioral, clinical, environmental, social, and economic factors all influence whether people can live longer, healthier lives. Health solutions science (rigorous, relevant, and actionable research that addresses drivers of health and disease) can fuel progress and improve health. As part of its “More than Medicine” campaign to demonstrate that health solutions science is rigorous and essential to realize improved health outcomes in the United States, the Pathways for Health Research Collective is offering this one-time funding opportunity to demonstrate the real-world impact of health solutions science and strengthen a national case for a sustainable enterprise.
Priority Areas
- The Collective seeks projects that:
- Apply evidence-based health solutions science in the United States at greater-than-pilot scale and rigorously measure health impact.
- Are ready to achieve a meaningful, measurable improvement in health outcomes—or near-term validated proxy outcomes linked to long-term health impact.
- Address a significant source of morbidity, and mortality.
- Build from an existing, sufficiently powered evidence base rather than testing a new idea for the first time.
- Bring together knowledge producers and knowledge users to implement, evaluate, and sustain the work. See page four of the request for applications for a definition of knowledge users.
- Have a feasible three-year plan, with clear milestones and endpoints.
- Leverage financial and nonfinancial commitments from relevant partners.
- Generate learning that can inform replication in other settings, populations, or at greater scale.
- Demonstrate the potential for health solutions science to advance policy, practice, or process innovation.
- Projects considered out of scope:
- Pilot projects intended to build evidence for a new intervention.
- Centers of excellence.
- Strictly research studies to discover new knowledge, including observational studies or secondary analyses intended only to document drivers of health or disease in a community.
- Strictly implementation science projects focused on studying or optimizing processes without evaluating impact on health outcomes.
- Projects seeking to establish the scale needed for a power assessment.
- Any work involving non-human animals.
- New or repurposed drug clinical trials.
- Projects to design, develop, or commercialize new medical devices, including prototypes and hardware-based diagnostics or therapeutics.
- Projects that rely solely on individual behavior change, such as health education programs, without addressing broader systems, conditions, incentives, environments, or structural factors.
Eligibility Criteria
- Highly collaborative, cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary proposals are expected.
- Lead organizations should have 501(c)(3) status.
- Applicant organizations that are state universities, which may not have 501(c)(3) status, are eligible to apply. The Collective prefers, but does not require, that state universities apply through their grant-receiving arms (e.g., applicants from the University of Michigan may apply through the University of Michigan Foundation).
- Entities without 501(c)(3) status may participate as collaborators.
- As a first step, interested applicants should complete the eligibility questionnaire.
- Eligible applicants will be prompted to complete the pre-proposal (Stage 1)
- Grant funding requests are expected to include leveraged resources from partners. Examples of leveraged resources are financial or in-kind commitments of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) employees, services, or infrastructure.
Pre-proposal Materials
- Information about applicant organization and team, including certification of review and approval of submission by applicant organization executive.
- Project descriptors.
- Health impact and strength of the underlying evidence.
- Engagement and alignment.
- Leverage.
- Seven-minute project description video.
- Preliminary estimated budget.
Additional Information and Resources
Please download the full Request for Applications for complete details, read Frequently Asked Questions, and review a recorded informational webinar and the slides presented. To start an application, sign in or create an account in the application portal. The Collective has partnered with Renaissance Philanthropy and their Big if True Science (BiTS) program to offer an optional webinar and office hours as resources available to all applicants to support development of their submissions.
Competitive pre-proposals (Stage 1) will be invited by February 2027 to submit full proposals (Stage 2) and will be provided detailed application instructions at that time. Stage 2 invited full proposals will be due in April 2027. Finalists selected from full proposal submissions will be invited to participate in a meeting with funders to present projects in June 2027. Results are expected by June 30, 2027, with the earliest grant start date of August 1, 2027.
Funding organizations participating in this program agree to centralized application intake and review through the Doris Duke Foundation. As the process reaches funding recommendations, a project may be funded wholly or in part by one or more participating funders. Each funder will establish a separate grant agreement with applicants for the portion of the project it agrees to support.
Questions from FAS or SEAS faculty about this opportunity may be directed to FAS Research Development. |
