Next Gen Pregnancy Initiative Grants

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund's Next Gen Pregnancy Initiative Grants aim to enhance research on pregnancy outcomes, addressing issues such as preterm birth and maternal health. With an emphasis on fostering diverse scientific collaboration, the initiative supports innovative proposals from researchers across various disciplines. Each grant offers up to $500,000 over four years, encouraging groundbreaking studies that explore the biological and environmental factors affecting pregnancy. This initiative seeks to improve health outcomes through informed research and interdisciplinary partnerships.

NOTE: Next Gen Pregnancy Initiative Grants are currently paused as updates to the program are considered.
Burroughs Wellcome Fund
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund serves and strengthens society by nurturing a diverse group of leaders in biomedical sciences to improve human health through education and powering discovery in frontiers of greatest need.
BWF’s financial support is channeled primarily through competitive peer-reviewed award programs.
BWF makes grants primarily to degree-granting institutions on behalf of individual researchers. To complement these competitive award programs, BWF also makes grants to nonprofit organizations conducting activities intended to improve the general environment for science.
BWF believes that a diverse scientific workforce is essential to the process and advancement of research innovation, academic discovery, and public service.
Building upon the original goals of the BWF Preterm Birth Initiative, a recently convened Pregnancy Think Tank has helped shape the next iteration of this award mechanism. Growing evidence suggests the interrelatedness of the duration of pregnancy, fetal growth, and adverse pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction, stillbirth, and maternal medical complications including maternal mortality. Other areas of interest are climate change and environmental impact on pregnancy, complications associated with ART, and epigenome-wide association studies. We have expanded the scope of this award mechanism to capture these and other pregnancy outcomes as we believe they will be mutually informative and accelerate discovery. Each award will continue to provide up to $500,000 over a four-year period ($125,000 per year).
The initiative is designed to stimulate both creative individual scientists and multi-investigator teams to approach healthy and adverse pregnancy outcomes using creative basic and translational scientific research methods. The formation of new connections between reproductive scientists and investigators who are involved in other areas is particularly encouraged. Postdoctoral fellows nearing their transition to independent investigator status through senior established investigators are encouraged to apply.
Molecular and computational approaches such as genetics/genomics, immunology, microbiology, evolutionary biology, mathematics, engineering, and other basic sciences hold enormous potential for new insights independently or in conjunction with more traditional areas of parturition research such as maternal-fetal medicine, obstetrics, and pediatrics. We encourage applications seeking actionable therapeutic interventions, novel diagnostics, and device development for real time data capture, and particularly those investigating mechanisms of racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes.
Potential Proposals
Proposals should address the biomedical causes and molecular mechanisms underlying adverse pregnancies and their outcomes including but not limited to peri-implantational events, placentation, fetal determinants, fetal-maternal immune responses, biological basis for racial-ethnic disparities, mechanisms relating preterm birth to other adverse pregnancy outcomes, biology of normal labor, genomics, evolutionary influences, maternal complications and other approaches. Proposals seeking to identify biomarkers predicting preterm birth are welcome.
BWF is also interested in Preterm Birth Risk Stratification using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Eligibility

Public or private non-profit organizations in the United States and Canada, including degree-granting academic institutions, research institutes and teaching hospitals, are eligible to receive Burroughs Wellcome Fund support.501(c)(3) or equivalentApplicants must hold a faculty appointment, or adjunct faculty appointment, at an accredited, degree-granting institution in the U.S. or Canada.Postdoctoral fellows nearing their transition to independent investigator status through senior established investigators are eligible to apply.Proposals can be submitted by individual investigators or research teams designating a contact principal investigator. At least one member of the team must have training and expertise outside the traditional areas of reproductive science.Proposals that cross institutional boundaries (partnerships between multiple universities or collaborations within larger universities) are welcomed.Citizens and non-citizen permanent and temporary residents of the U.S. and Canada who are legally qualified to work in the U.S. or Canada are eligible.Candidates who are temporary U.S. residents must hold a valid U.S. visa (J-1, H1B, F-1 or O-1 visas).Temporary Canadian residents must hold a valid Canadian visa (Study Permit, C-43, C-44, C-10, or C-20 work permits/visas).If you are a postdoctoral candidate, your visa status must allow you to remain in the U.S. or Canada during the project period of the grant. If a grant is awarded and your visa does not allow for such a stay, BWF may terminate the grant. BWF will not intercede on behalf of non-citizens whose stay in the U.S. or Canada falls out of visa compliance.Former BWF preterm birth or next generation pregnancy award recipients whose grant has been completed may reapply for another award provided the proposal submitted is a substantially different proposal (must not be a continuation or slight modification of previous work). The principal investigator must demonstrate successful outcomes and highlight significant achievements from the earlier award.

Ineligibility

Current or active BWF preterm birth grant or next generation pregnancy award recipients are not eligible to reapply.Award recipients may not hold concurrent BWF awards.Indirect costs may not be charged against the awards.Institutional overhead may not be charged against BWF grants.