Dissertation Research Grants

The Russell Sage Foundation offers Dissertation Research Grants to support innovative research addressing key social science questions. Focus areas include behavioral science, immigration, and economic inequality, particularly benefiting underrepresented doctoral students. Grants of up to $15,000 are available for projects that demonstrate rigorous methods and relevance to U.S. social conditions. The foundation prioritizes diverse applicants and those lacking funding resources to ensure impactful research outcomes.

Russell Sage Foundation
The foundation dedicates itself to strengthening the methods, data, and theories of the social sciences as a means of diagnosing social problems and improving social policies. It also funds researchers at other institutions and supports programs intended to develop new generations of social scientists.
The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) has established a dissertation research grants (DRG) program to support innovative and high-quality dissertation research projects that address questions relevant to RSF’s priority areas:
Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context Future of WorkRace, Ethnicity and ImmigrationImmigration and Immigrant IntegrationSocial, Political, and Economic Inequality
Proposed projects must be closely aligned with the funding priorities listed on the RSF website for any of these areas, contribute to RSF’s mission to improve social and living conditions in the U.S., and demonstrate appropriate use of relevant theory, innovative data, rigorous research methods, and measures.
In partnership, RSF and the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research will support dissertation research on employment-related topics in any discipline, with particular interest in policy-relevant research pertaining to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.
The maximum allowable budget is $15,000 for a one-year grant.

Eligibility

Applicants must be enrolled doctoral students at an institution of higher education in the U.S. or a U.S. territory, who have completed all program requirements except the dissertation. In line with the RSF’s mandate, all projects must focus on the U.S. In exceptional cases, RSF may consider projects analyzing data collected outside the U.S. (e.g., experimental data, survey data, etc.) if the researcher can demonstrate that the data needed for the project is not available or obtainable in the U.S., and that the analysis has strong relevance to improving social and living conditions in the United States.To receive funding, an applicant whose proposal is selected for a grant must have their dissertation supervisor document that the dissertation research:is the same research that was described in the DRG proposal and  has been approved by the dissertation committee. In cases where a dissertation consists of several related papers, the proposal should focus on the most important paper. These grants will support all aspects of dissertation research (data collection, data preparation, data analysis and writing).There is a lifetime limit of one dissertation research grant per applicant.

Ineligibility

These grants are not intended for students who have completed data collection and analysis and propose to spend the entire grant period writing the dissertation.Previous recipients of RSF grants are ineligible.RSF priorities do not include analyses of where the primary focus is on health​ or mental health outcomes or health behaviors ​as these are priorities for other funders. ​RSF seldom supports studies focused on educational processes or curricular issues.RSF does not allow indirect costs on Dissertation Research Grants.