Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: Matter-to-Life Grant

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: Matter-to-Life Grant

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Alfred P Sloan Foundation
Last Updated: February 24, 2026

Summary

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Matter-to-Life Grant aims to advance research that explores the physical principles distinguishing living systems from inanimate matter. It focuses on understanding how life emerges from complex matter and supports innovative projects in three key areas: Building Life, Principles of Life, and Signs of Life. This initiative encourages interdisciplinary approaches and seeks to foster collaboration among researchers to deepen our understanding of life and its unique characteristics.

Overview

NOTE: Grant-seekers with a relevant research project or meeting idea should submit a Letter of Inquiry of no more than two pages to the Program Director. For more about what to include in a Letter of Inquiry, please refer to our Letter of Inquiry Guidelines. Mission The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes grants primarily to support original research and education related to science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. The Foundation believes that these fields—and the scholars and practitioners who work in them—are chief drivers of the nation's health and prosperity. The Foundation also believes that a reasoned, systematic understanding of the forces of nature and society, when applied inventively and wisely, can lead to a better world for all. Matter-to-Life Program Goal To sharpen our scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter, and to explore the conditions under which physical principles and mechanisms guide the complexification of matter towards life. The Program Our understanding of the physical world is impressive. It includes, for instance, both detailed knowledge about the history of the universe and a comprehensive understanding of the building blocks of matter. But despite these advances, we don't yet have a comparably deep understanding of how those building blocks lead to life and organisms. How can life emerge from an information-processing matter system? Do the principles that guide order-generating processes in nature also underly the development of functional structures in organisms? What key functions distinguish living from nonliving systems and how might these functions be realized using a range of matter platforms? Answering these and related questions that probe the distinctiveness of life constitutes a grand challenge where breakthroughs can have outsized impacts for both science and society. Today we recognize that the distinctiveness of life is not to be found in some unique type of matter comprising organisms, but rather in the novel ways in which matter is organized within living systems, the most complex arrangements of matter known. Understanding these distinctive modes of organization means identifying the novel functional capabilities exhibited by organisms and understanding how those functions are realized. Achieving this understanding will shed light on the matter-life nexus. While the matter-life boundary is not sharp, well-chosen scientific explorations can play an important role in helping to identify significant milestones along the transition from nonliving to living matter. Sloan's Matter-to-Life program aims to sharpen our scientific understanding of life by supporting curiosity-driven research falling within three focus areas: Building Life, Principles of Life, and Signs of Life. These areas define a broad scientific scope for understanding the physical principles and mechanisms governing living systems, while also highlighting an openness to exploring life broadly conceived by instantiating the distinctive functions of living systems in entities built using various matter platforms. The program will also support scientific meetings that promote information exchange, the development of collaborations, and self-organizing efforts aimed at making a case to other funders for supporting matter-to-life research. We're hopeful the long-term impact of the program will be that we've rallied a community to start new lines of research that ultimately lead to a deep scientific understanding of life that explains both its physical distinctiveness and any processes that guide the complexification of matter towards life. Focus Areas Research grants in Sloan's Matter-to-Life program seek to advance theoretical and experimental efforts aimed at unraveling the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter, and that explore whether and how physical principles guide the complexification of matter towards life. We recognize that both multi-disciplinary and exploratory work is needed to advance matter-to-life science, and the program is open to projects with these features when they are important to advancing the proposed science.

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. Supported projects may involve any or all of the following:Building LifeProjects in this focus area attempt to learn about life by trying to construct it. Supported projects seek to advance our understanding of the matter-life boundary by constructing artificial (synthetic biological or abiotic) microscale systems that either teach us about important life-sustaining processes or lead to entities that mimic key life-like behaviors.Grants could, for instance, support efforts to build protocells or other entities suitable for studying far-from-equilibrium processes or other processes important to life but which are too complex to study within natural cells. For grants that seek to build entities that demonstrate life-like behaviors, investigators will propose a set of life-like behaviors whose implementation in a given platform is both achievable and provides significant insight into living systems. Example behaviors include replication, metabolism, evolution, environmental sensing and information-processing that leads to adaptive behavior or cooperative community behavior.Achievable life-like behaviors will be platform-dependent, and grants will seek to stimulate the development of platforms that eventually produce bio-inspired entities leveraging hierarchical design and self-assembly principles to achieve structure and function.Principles of LifeProjects in this focus area attempt to identify the key physical principles that govern living systems broadly conceived by identifying the principles governing biological organisms. The program is open to supporting both reductionistic and top-down efforts. Reductionistic approaches seek to determine the detailed, often nanoscale, mechanisms by which organisms realize their essential functions. Here the program will favor supporting underappreciated approaches for unraveling the mechanisms of biology such as biomechanics, fluid dynamics, and thermodynamics.The program will also support top-down efforts to identify the emergent phenomena exhibited by living systems. Here the goal is to develop comparatively simple models that provide explanatory and predictive power at the level of the emergent phenomena, without resort to more fine-grained processes or mechanisms.For both approaches, the ultimate goal is to uncover the key organizing principles and mechanisms that must be implemented in any platform to achieve a living system. We expect that working towards this goal will lead to the discovery of new physics, particularly new emergent physics exhibited by the class of complex systems within which organisms reside as distinctive, far-from-equilibrium physical systems.Signs of LifeProjects in this focus area attempt to sharpen our understanding of the distinctive signatures associated with living systems by identifying such signatures, quantifying these signatures, and exploring the physical principles and mechanisms underlying these signatures.Projects that propose to identify signatures will develop platforms or methods aimed at reliably detecting the presence of life. Relevant efforts could, for instance, include research to determine signatures of life on other planets.Projects that propose to quantify signatures will work to develop quantitative metrics that could be used to distinguish living from nonliving systems, or to develop predictive models that quantitatively describe signatures of life. Projects that propose to examine the principles and mechanisms underlying signatures will explore models to describe these signatures with an eye towards making connections between order-generating processes in inanimate matter and the ordered structures and processes found in organisms.Budget & Detailed Budget JustificationRequests for salary should adhere to the following restrictions based on the type of staff seeking support:Faculty (on a 9-month academic salary)All faculty supported through a Sloan grant must receive a standard benefits package customary for their institution.Proposals may request (and must justify) up to one month of summer salary support for senior faculty members in the amount of either 1/9 of academic-year salary or $35,000, whichever is lower.The Foundation may make exceptions to this policy in unusual circumstances, but a strong case for such an exception must be made in the budget justification.For faculty on unpaid leave, the Foundation may consider modest academic-year salary support.Project StaffAs needed, up to 100 percent of full-time salaryAll project/research staff employed by the grantee institution must receive a standard benefits package customary for the institution.Postdoctoral ResearchersAs needed, up to 100 percent of full-time salary.Salary must be customary for the department and institution employing the researcher.All Sloan-supported postdoctoral researchers must receive a standard benefits package customary for their institution.Graduate StudentsAs needed, up to 100 percent of full-time salarySalary must be customary for the department and institution employing the student.TuitionThe Foundation strongly prefers that funds requested for graduate students be allocated toward salaries, stipends, and other forms of direct support.If tuition coverage must be requested, a clear rationale must be provided in the budget justification.In all circumstances, tuition reimbursement will be capped at the NSF Graduate Research Fellow cost-of-education allowance, as specified in the most recent NSF program solicitation, currently set at $16,000 per student per year.If there is a subcontract, proposers must split overhead costs with the subcontractor institution, with total overhead not to exceed 20 percent of direct project costs.The Foundation suggests that the grantee’s institution take 4% of the overhead on the subcontract and assign the remaining 16% to the subcontractor (although this specific overhead split is not a strict requirement).If the total cost of the project is larger than the amount requested from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the request should include a financial plan for the whole effort that identifies any other financial contributions (either secured or anticipated).When possible, letters of support from other funders should be included indicating their willingness to provide funds and the amount of support to be provided.Empirical Research MethodsGrant proposals that request support for research must include a detailed methodological discussion in the form of an appendix.On some occasions, the Foundation will support the purchase or construction of scientific equipment if such equipment is essential to the success of a Foundation-supported research project or educational initiative.

Ineligibility

The program will not support biomedical or disease-related research.The Sloan Foundation does not support research with the goal of creating mirror organisms.What We Do Not FundThe Foundation does not make grants to political campaigns, to support political activities, or to lobby for or against particular pieces of legislation.The Foundation does not make grants to individuals except through its Books program.The Foundation does not generally make grants to for-profit institutions.The Foundation does not make grants in religion, medical research, or research in the humanities.The Foundation does not make grants aimed at pre-college students except through its New York City initiative.The Foundation does not make grants to projects in the creative or performing arts except when those projects are related to educating the public about science, technology, or economics.The Foundation does not make grants for endowments, fundraising drives, or fundraising dinners.The Foundation does not make grants in support of the purchase, construction, or renovation of buildings or laboratories.The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation does not accept or review unsolicited grant proposals.Budget & Detailed Budget JustificationFaculty (on a 9-month academic salary)The Foundation discourages budget requests to pay summer salary for senior faculty.Graduate StudentsThe Foundation does not pay indirect costs on graduate student tuition.Note also that tuition is excluded from overhead calculations, so if the subcontractor is spending money on grad student tuition, that money is not eligible for overhead.For grant requests of $50,000 or less, no indirect (overhead) costs are permitted.For grant requests in excess of $50,000, indirect (overhead) costs may not exceed 20 percent of direct project costs.