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Greetings,

 

We are excited to share this funding opportunity from the Biswas Family Foundation. The Foundation offers Fast Grants for researchers who want to explore an idea at the intersection of AI and health. The application period for Cycle 2 will open on November 15, 2026. 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.

 

Biswas Family Foundation Fast Grants

  • OSP Deadline: December 8, 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 Deadline: December 15, 2026
  • Award Amounts:
    • Small Curiosity Sprints: $25,000 for one year, with 20 awards anticipated.
    • Pilot Experiments: $50,000 for one year, with 10 awards anticipated.
    • More Ambitious Projects: $100,000 for one year, with 5 awards anticipated.
    • Indirect costs for all application types is capped at 15%. 
 

Program Overview

 

Hope and Sanjit Biswas founded the Biswas Family Foundation in 2023 with the goal of leveraging scientific and technological advancements to revolutionize healthcare and make a lasting impact on global public health. The Foundation's Fast Grants are for researchers who want to explore a curiosity-driven project at the intersection of AI and health; specifically projects connected to any of the following themes:

  • Training, fine-tuning, or evaluating models on biomedical data
  • Pilot experiments that de-risk a bigger funding ask
  • Exploring or assembling datasets that could unlock new clinical or biological insight
  • Building AI tools or agents that scale a scientist's leverage
  • Anything else where modest, fast capital meaningfully accelerates an AI or data-driven path to a health breakthrough     
 

Priority Areas

  • The Foundation especially welcomes projects aligned with the two research pillars described below:
    • Pillar 1 — AI-Driven Diagnostics and Prediction
      • Computational cardiology and stroke prevention
      • AI-enabled diagnostics that drop cost and raise frequency
      • AI for metabolic disease
      • Cancer early detection (especially open-source multi-cancer early detection)
      • Medical forecasting and multimodal risk
    • Pillar 2 — Personalized Therapeutics and Autonomous Research
      • Phage therapy and AI-designed therapeutics
      • Personalized cancer immunotherapy
      • AI scientists and autonomous research
      • AI epidemiology at scale
 

Eligibility Criteria

  • Researchers at any career stage across academic institutions worldwide are eligible.
  • Applicants in the U.S. must be affiliated with a 501(c)(3) public charity in good standing — universities, non-profit research institutes, academic medical centers, qualifying hospitals; state or federal government instrumentalities (e.g., state university research foundations) are eligible. 
  • For non-U.S. institutions, a foreign equivalent is required.
  • For-profit companies, individual researchers receiving funds personally, and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)-sanctioned institutions are not eligible to apply.
  • The Foundation strongly prefers to support projects that allow for release of code, models, and/or datasets back to the community so they are accessible to the field beyond the grant period.  
 

Application Materials

  • Project Title
  • One-Sentence Summary (≤200 characters) 
  • Question or Idea (3–5 bullets, ~50 words, 275 characters)
  • What You'll Do (3–5 bullets, ~50 words, 275 characters)
  • Why Now / Why This Team (2–3 bullets, ~30 words, 200 characters)
  • Budget (~50 words, 275 characters). Budgets are flexible and can include costs such as:
    • Cloud compute, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) rentals, Application Programming Interface (API) or token credits
    • Dataset acquisition or licensing
    • Research assistant or trainee hours
    • Small reagents and consumables
    • Travel to disseminate results
  • Outputs (1–2 bullets, ~20 words, 125 characters)
  • Brief Bio (3–4 bullets, ~80 words, 400 characters)
 

Additional Information and Resources

 

The application for the next cycle will open on November 15, 2026.

 

The Biswas Family Foundation will fund up to $3M annually. Review previously awarded Fast Grants to learn about projects the Foundation has supported.

 

Questions from FAS or SEAS faculty about this opportunity may be directed to FAS Research Development.

RESOURCES

Research Development maintains a Sample Proposal Library of successful proposals from recent award recipients that are available to FAS and SEAS faculty by request; please email Research Development to request to view a proposal. For more information on Research Development's resources—including lists of internal funding programs, early career funding programs, and sabbatical fellowships—please visit the Funding Opportunities web page. Previous editions of FAS Funding Focus (FFF), a resource series tailored to help FAS faculty and staff navigate the ever-evolving landscape of grants and funding, are accessible in the FFF archive. 
 

SEARCH FOR OPPORTUNITIES WITH PIVOT

All Harvard affiliates can search for opportunities and set up alerts using Pivot, a searchable database of federal and private funding opportunities. Information on Pivot, including a one-page user guide, and other funding opportunity databases available to the Harvard community can be found on the Funding Databases web page.
 

PIVOT CURATED SEARCHES

Curated funding opportunity lists are funding search topics of broad interest. The following curated lists can be further refined in Pivot based on your funding needs. To view the results you must be on a Harvard network or logged in to your Pivot account. Information on setting up a Pivot account can be found in our one-page Pivot user guide. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Additional curated lists are available on the Funding Databases web page. We continue to add to and refine these lists based on feedback. Please feel free to reach out to us at research_development@fas.harvard.edu with any suggestions you may have.
 Research Development | FAS Office of Research Administration | research.fas.harvard.edu
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