Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas Grant

Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas Grant

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: The Greenwall Foundation
Last Updated: January 11, 2026

Summary

The Greenwall Foundation's Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas Grant seeks proposals for innovative research addressing pressing bioethics issues in healthcare, policy, and practice. Projects should focus on topics such as trust in science, healthcare bias, public health crises, and healthcare access. The Foundation aims to support inclusive bioethics that incorporates diverse perspectives, promoting impactful solutions to real-world dilemmas while ensuring that bioethics remains central to decision-making in health-related fields.

Overview

Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas Grant The Greenwall Foundation is requesting proposals for the Spring 2026 cycle of its bioethics grants program, Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas. The Making a Difference program supports research to help resolve important emerging or unanswered bioethics problems in clinical, biomedical, or public health decision-making, policy, or practice.The Foundation’s vision is to make bioethics integral to decisions in health care, policy, and research. Our mission is to expand bioethics knowledge to improve clinical, biomedical, and public health decision-making, policy, and practice. Projects funded under the Making a Difference program should promote the Foundation’s vision and mission through innovative bioethics research that will have a real-world, practical impact.In addition, the Foundation is committed to building a broad and inclusive bioethics that welcomes everyone, elevates many perspectives, asks a wide range of questions, and learns from diverse voices. Priority Topics While we welcome all innovative proposals that will have a real-world impact, we are particularly interested in proposals that address the ethical issues raised by the following priority topics: Trust in science, medicine, and public health;Bias and discrimination in health care, which may be based on a broad range of characteristics;Public health crises (related to, for example, emerging infectious diseases, climate change, and the opioid epidemic), including their impact on mental health;Healthcare access, costs, and resource allocation.Recent changes to the federal health and biomedical science policy and funding landscape. Proposals for projects that address other real-world, practical bioethics problems are also welcome.

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. The Greenwall Foundation only makes awards to affiliated individuals at institutions with tax-exempt status with the United States Internal Revenue Service.Projects may be empirical, conceptual, or normative. All proposals should explain how they will help address a real-world bioethics dilemma. The Foundation will support mentored projects in which a postdoctoral fellow or junior faculty member works closely with an experienced bioethics scholar. The Foundation will also consider pilot or feasibility projects to evaluate an innovative intervention to resolve a bioethics dilemma, with the goal of obtaining funding from other sources for a larger evaluation or demonstration project. Some highly promising projects may be funded for an initial phase, with additional funding contingent on achieving clear milestones. The research team needs to have relevant and appropriate expertise to carry out the proposed project. Successful teams commonly involve a bioethics scholar and persons with on-the-ground experience with the bioethics dilemma, for example, in clinical care; biomedical research; biotechnology, pharmaceutical, big data, and artificial intelligence companies; or public service. Such collaboration can specify the bioethics problems that clinicians, researchers, policymakers, public health officials, and others face in their daily work, and facilitate practical resolutions to these problems. We expect grantees to disseminate their research through practical articles in peer-reviewed journals that reach the appropriate audience for the topic studied, presentations in relevant professional meetings, and in other ways that will increase real-world impact. Applicants should describe, for example, how they will disseminate their results beyond academic audiences, such as to lay and community groups or to leaders of institutions who could implement the project’s recommendations or act upon empirical findings (e.g., leaders of clinical services, research programs, institutional review boards, or medical education).

Ineligibility

Projects with the following characteristics will not be funded under this program: Projects for which bioethics is not the main focus;Projects that simply describe or analyze bioethics issues or provide a conceptual framework, without making practical recommendations for resolving the issues; Projects that implement or make incremental improvements in established approaches to bioethics problems, build institutional infrastructure, or provide bioethics education, training, or coursework;Projects that have predetermined conclusions or advocate for predetermined positions;Projects whose main goal is to convene or enhance a meeting, unless there is a well-developed plan to produce a major peer-reviewed publication with consensus recommendations, guidelines, or best practices that have a strong likelihood of real-world implementation. The applicant must have a strong record in convening similar successful impactful meetings;Projects to support or extend ongoing or core activities of an organization; andProjects with a principal investigator who does not have a PhD, JD, MD, or an equivalent doctoral-level degree.In addition, an individual cannot simultaneously receive Making a Difference and Faculty Scholars Program funding from The Greenwall Foundation. Moreover, an individual cannot simultaneously be the principal investigator on open applications under consideration by the Foundation in the two programs.