Pathway to Stop Diabetes Accelerator Award (ACE) Grant

The Pathway to Stop Diabetes Accelerator Award supports innovative early-career researchers tackling diabetes-related challenges. It offers flexible funding up to $325,000 annually for transformative research. Candidates must have independent faculty status and demonstrated productivity in diabetes research. The program aims to inspire groundbreaking discoveries by providing essential resources and mentorship, thereby improving the lives of those affected by diabetes. Nominations focus on translational research that bridges basic science with practical benefits for patients.

Pathway to Stop Diabetes® (2025): Call for Nominations
Pathway to Stop Diabetes® has a simple, yet revolutionary goal: to find scientists at the peak of their creativity and provide them with the flexibility and resources they need on the road to breakthrough discoveries. Our three areas of focus—awarding research grants, providing access to scientific and career mentoring from leading diabetes researchers, and creating a diabetes think tank—are each key components of a unique formula to cultivate the next generation of leaders, whose discoveries will stop diabetes and its burdens once and for all.
To accelerate the research needed to stop this deadly disease, the American Diabetes Association’s bold transformational initiative, Pathway to Stop Diabetes®, is inspiring a new generation of diabetes researchers. Pathway provides crucial support to individuals focusing on innovative ideas and transformational approaches that will lead to ground-breaking discoveries in diabetes prevention, management, and cures. We are building a human pathway to tackle the toughest questions in diabetes by driving research innovations through 1:1 mentorship and the creation of a brain trust in diabetes.
This call for nominations will prioritize translational applications that move knowledge and discovery gained from basic research to its eventual translation into patient and population benefit. The ideal applicant will propose innovative research that will be an important step towards the eventual goal of improving the lives of people at risk of diabetes or living with the disease - and the pathway to this impact is clear. Our vision is to create a pathway to launch the next generation of trailblazers in diabetes research.
The Pathway to Stop Diabetes® Accelerator award is intended to provide flexible, long-term salary and research support to early career researchers who are proposing innovative and ambitious diabetes-related research programs, and who have distinguished themselves as exceptionally talented and promising research investigators.
These awards are highly competitive and intended to support particularly innovative and transformational ideas that have the potential to have an exceptional impact in diabetes with an emphasis on the investigator’s potential to significantly transform diabetes through research (‘moving the needle’) to improve the lives of people with diabetes.
Candidates for Accelerator awards should be in the process of establishing successful, independent diabetes research programs, and have records of independent productivity in research. For this award, demonstration of independent productivity should include that the candidate is currently in an independent faculty position, has demonstrated the ability to perform a particular set of experiments at a high-quality level, including senior author publications (independent of training mentors) and/or has demonstrated the ability to obtain independent funding/support for their work.
Maximum Funding
Up to $100,000 USD per year in Phase 1, Up to $325,000 USD per year in Phase 2