After Nearly a Century Funding Science, the Sloan Foundation Is Searching for Answers Near and Far

Now pushing 90, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is one of the country's longest-running private science funders, with grantmaking to support a mix of research areas that it believes are crucial to the nation's health and prosperity. This has made it not just a funder of basic research in areas like particle physics, but perhaps more notably a supporter of regular-person-adjacent areas of technology, engineering, economics and other social sciences — topics that shape everyday life and inform national policy decisions.

I spoke recently with Sloan President Adam F. Falk to learn about how the foundation is directing its funding dollars these days, in particular, how the storied foundation balances deep questions of fundamental science with needs and goals that emerge in the here and now.

Some of the more recent trends that Falk discussed reflect national and global subjects that play out in the news every day, making for a mix of surprisingly varied funding programs and interests. They include industrial policy, the mathematics of voter redistricting, the growing care economy, inflation, and the transition to low-carbon energy. Sloan also has its sights set a little farther from home, taking on topics like the search for signatures of life on other planets — a fast-developing area of science that's driven by an influx of exciting new data from powerful astronomical telescopes.

And across all of its fields of interest in the natural and social sciences, Sloan devotes substantial energies to the community of the scholars who conduct the research — supporting efforts to boost collaboration and interdisciplinary work, for example, and promoting diversity in STEM academics and related professions. Not least, Falk told me, Sloan recognizes the importance of helping the public engage with and understand science and technology, especially important in a time when incorrect and even dangerously misleading information spreads at the speed of the internet.

Fundamental questions in science

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was established in 1934 by General Motors executive Alfred Sloan and has grown to become one of the largest private foundations in the country, with more than $2 billion in assets. Sloan awards approximately 200 grants per year, for roughly $90 million in annual commitments. More than half of that total, Falk said, about $50 million — goes to academic research. The foundation also supports early career researchers through the Sloan Research Fellowships, two-year fellowships that provide $75,000 to sizable cohorts of 125 fellows each year.

Now, $90 million is a lot of money, but Sloan faces the same question that all science funders must deal with: how to direct its grantmaking for greatest impact. That means searching for important but underfunded research areas, says Falk. "How in the world can you have impact in a world where the National Science Foundation spends 100 times (what philanthropy does)?” he said. “And the answer is, you have to find interesting work that for structural reasons struggles to get funded."

In its science funding, Sloan also aims to identify fields that are primed for precipitous advancements, typically because of leaps forward in research techniques or technologies, or because of the potential for new collaborations.

For example, one recently launched Sloan program, Matter-to-Life, seeks answers to fundamental questions in biology and related fields of natural science, backing research to understand the principles that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter, and how life emerges from nonliving matter. It's illustrative of the type of interdisciplinary research that private funding is more willing to take on compared to public sources. Understanding how living systems differ from nonliving systems is an inherently interdisciplinary set of questions, said Falk, and the program has funded physicists, chemists, biologists, computer scientists and geoscientists. "Some of it's risky, and quite speculative, and we don't know where it's going to go," he said. "This is hard to get funded from the national funding agencies, because they tend to work in disciplinary silos."

Pressing challenges of our time

Sometimes, there are glaring gaps in funding even within subjects of intense focus, like energy and climate. Sloan has long supported study of energy and its economics, but more recently, with climate change driving significant disruption around the world, the foundation has developed greater interest in the national and global transition to lower-carbon forms of energy.

Much of the philanthropic funding seeking a transition to a low-carbon future is interested in strategies like policy, advocacy, legal work and finance, with relatively little going toward research. So Sloan has opted to fund research, particularly interdisciplinary research, in areas like battery and storage technologies, and assessments of policies to generate reliable data upon upon which the public and policymakers can base decisions.

"What's really interesting about our program is that it's about research, not advocacy," Falk said. For example, Sloan has granted over $5 million through its Net-Zero and Negative Emissions Technologies to projects addressing carbon capture, net-zero emission agriculture, and geothermal energy production and storage.

Economics continues to be one of Sloan's signature areas of interest, as it has for decades. In recent years, the foundation has ramped up funding in the area of behavioral economics, said Falk. This field of inquiry has accelerated in part due to the increasing availability and usability of big data sets — an unplanned but useful benefit of the computerization of so many aspects of life and society, and one that enables researchers to measure and interpret the world in new ways.

Another relatively novel but growing area of interest within Sloan's economics program is industrial policy. "For years, the consensus in economics was that any intervention by the government to the economy will only mess things up," Falk said. "But now, if you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, or the CHIPS and Science Act, there's very explicit intention to support industries in their development." Around the world, other governments do intervene in their own economies strongly, and development of modern industrial policy must be based on research that makes sense of the world as it is.

Also recent is Sloan's grantmaking around the understudied care economy — that is, to understand the economic role and impact of how the country cares for children, the elderly, sick or disabled people, and provides education and more. "This was made poignantly clear by the pandemic, which really changed the way in which people were able to access things like child care and school, and the effect on individuals and on the economy as a whole due to the disruption of that whole system," said Falk. "How should that be factored into our analyses of the economy?"

Sloan operates many more funding programs than have been discussed above, and researchers and grantseekers should visit the foundation's Open Calls page for a more complete list of funding opportunities.

Across all of its funding, however, particularly in economics and other social sciences, Falk said, is Sloan's essential goal to generate data that policymakers need, but not to advocate for policies themselves. "We don't take positions because we want to protect the researchers we fund so they are viewed as being impartial on these key policy questions," he said. "It's very important that we remain neutral, policy-wise."

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