Funding
Opportunities

The Fellows-to-Faculty Award program supports talented early career scientists by facilitating their transition into tenure-track faculty positions. The focus of this program is the $600,000 USD three-year faculty research grant. Additionally, fellows engage with a community of investigators and receive mentoring and peer support during their transition. The Simons Foundation’s Autism & Neuroscience division offers…

SFARI is accepting applications for funding of Patient Advocacy Group Family Conferences, with a focus on groups in the Simons Searchlight community. This funding is intended to support and enhance the research component of conferences, from scientist presentations to in-person research opportunities for families. It is open to both patient advocacy groups (PAGs) with well-established…

The SPARK Research Match Expansion RFA is an effort to engage with and increase research participation by individuals whose genetic ancestries have been undersampled in clinical research. Funding will provide per-person participant incentives (e.g., gift cards) for participation in projects that utilize SPARK Research Match to recruit participants into new research studies or to broaden…

The goal of this award is to increase use of large, publicly available data resources by supporting investigators to allocate time and personnel toward working in and publishing from these previously collected data. Applications should leverage existing publicly accessible datasets to ask new questions and extract new knowledge. Priority will be given to applications that…

The Autism & Neuroscience division at the Simons Foundation is accepting applications for funding of courses or conferences. This year, courses and conferences that align with the scientific missions of any of the following programs will be prioritized: Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), with a mission to advance the basic science of autism and…

The goal of the Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) program is to spark and sustain interest in neuroscience among undergraduate students who have not had access to research training opportunities. SURFiN provides funds for paid, in-person undergraduate research assistantships during the academic year to students living near Simons Foundation-supported laboratories in the U.S.,…

Grants awarded through this request for applications (RFA) are intended to recharge and extend a consortium of researchers using rats as an experimental system to advance our understanding of the behavioral and circuit neuroscience mechanisms underlying autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD).

The Linking Early Neurodevelopment to Neural Circuit Outcomes RFA aims to bridge the gap in our understanding of whether and how developmental phenotypes caused by autism risk gene mutation lead to altered circuit formation and function. We strongly encourage proposals involving close collaboration between investigators from a range of backgrounds, such as developmental neurobiologists and…

The goal of the Pilot Progression Award is to provide continuing support for projects initiated during SFARI Pilot awards that have advanced significantly and produced insights that justify an extension.

The goal of the Pilot Award is to provide early support for exploratory ideas considered higher risk but with the potential for transformative results, particularly those with novel hypotheses for autism. This funding mechanism is particularly suitable for investigators new to the autism field, though we encourage applicants to consult with experts in autism research…

Grants awarded through the Cross-Species Studies of ASD RFA were intended to support multi-disciplinary teams of PIs with expertise in both human and animal research to perform coordinated cross-species studies to advance our understanding of ASD-relevant behaviors and their underlying neurobiological mechanisms, with the potential for developing novel biomarkers or interventions.

The Human Cognitive and Behavioral Science RFA prioritized research that produces foundational knowledge about the neurobehavioral differences associated with ASD. These projects were expected to inform or relate to the development and refinement of tools needed for translational efforts, such as biomarkers and outcome measures. Special emphasis was placed on objective, quantitative measures that may…

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to improve our understanding of the molecular and cellular consequences of genetic risk for ASD, and to provide a foundation for the development of new therapies. Special emphasis was placed on the use of scalable methods, especially as applied to genes that are suitable targets for genetic therapies.

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to advance the understanding of autism spectrum disorder through analyses of human postmortem brain tissue donated to the Autism BrainNet collection.

SFARI launched the Autism Rat Models Consortium (ARC) in 2022 with a group of researchers funded through the original Autism Rat Models Consortium RFA. These researchers are using rats generated with SFARI funding that carry mutations in high-confidence genes that in humans significantly increase the likelihood of developing autism and related NDD. As part of the consortium, these…

Grants awarded through this RFA supplemented funding from other agencies for ongoing pregnancy cohorts to broaden biospecimen collection and to extend post-natal family tracking. These cohorts and biospecimen collections can be leveraged in future research to understand the effects of gestational infection and inflammation on autism risk in children.

SFARI Collaborations are a new funding mechanism that will provide substantive and stable funding support to multidisciplinary teams of investigators tackling critical issues in the autism research field. Collaborations will be led by a director who oversees interdisciplinary, synergistic research efforts across multiple laboratories. Investigative groups within a Collaboration will focus on the same conceptually…

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to provide support for the investigation of key unresolved research questions in autism, particularly those that connect etiology to brain function and behavior. SFARI welcomed risk and novelty in Research Award proposals, but potential impact on the autism research field was the most important criterion. Competitive applications had…

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to develop and validate outcome measures that are suitable for use in intervention studies that target the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder. Such measures should provide objective data with strong psychometric properties, be scalable for use in large, multisite studies, not be unduly burdensome to participants and…

SPARK is a SFARI initiative intended to recruit, engage and retain a community of 50,000 individuals with autism, and their family members, in the United States. This research cohort includes children and adults who span the full autism spectrum and individuals of all socio-demographic backgrounds. Through this RFA, SFARI supported additional U.S.-based clinical sites for…

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to advance our understanding of the genetic basis of autism. Investigators who are interested in analyzing genomic data in innovative ways from thousands of SPARK families were encouraged to apply.

This RFA was intended for proposals requesting support of exploratory experiments that will strengthen hypotheses and lead to the formulation of competitive applications for subsequent larger-scale funding by SFARI or other organizations. Innovative, high-risk/high-impact proposals were encouraged. We especially encouraged applications from investigators who are new to the field of autism, but who have expertise…

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to advance our understanding of the genetic basis of autism, and in particular, to begin to assess genetic variants conferring risk in non-coding regions and in coding regions of the genome that may be less accessible to whole-exome sequencing. Investigators who are interested in developing innovative and efficient…

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to advance our understanding of the genetic basis of autism, and in particular the potential role of missense and in-frame deletion variants in conferring risk. Investigators who are interested in developing medium- or high-throughput screens to test the functional effects of missense and in-frame deletion variants identified in…

Grants awarded through this RFA were intended to advance our understanding of the impact of activation of the innate immune system on behavioral, circuit, synaptic and neuronal functions in order to understand the consequences of infection and immune activation on autism-related behaviors. Experiments were expected to include physiologically relevant activation/inhibition of the innate immune system…

This RFA was intended to advance our understanding of the circuit basis for behavioral and cognitive alterations relevant to autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The goal was to determine the downstream consequences of autism-associated genetic perturbations on neural circuitry, with an emphasis on how collections of neurons operate in concert during autism-relevant behaviors.

This RFA sought proposals that take advantage of the unique combination of biospecimens and rich phenotypic information collected by Simons VIP. Although SFARI was open to many different approaches, we gave priority to those that aim to accomplish a comprehensive characterization of RNA expression differences and correlate such expression patterns with phenotypes. Furthering the ability…

This RFA sought proposals that aimed to comprehensively analyze the behavior of mouse models that have been generated with targeted genetic mutations based on strong human genetic evidence implicating them in autism spectrum disorders. We expected investigators to test at least three genetic models in the same background strain (C57BL/6). In addition, investigators needed to…

The following SFARI grant was awarded in response to the Mouse phenotyping request for applications (RFA): Ted Abel, Ph.D. (University… Read More

The following investigators have been awarded SFARI grants in response to the Innate Immune System Impact request for applications (RFA):… Read More

The following investigators have been awarded SFARI grants in response to the Circuit Dynamics request for applications (RFA): Rui Costa,… Read More

  The following SFARI grant was awarded in response to the Analysis of Simons VIP Biospecimens request for applications (RFA):… Read More

This Innate Immune System Impact Request for Applications is closed. A PDF of its accompanying FAQ document is here. More… Read More