In 2021, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation launched a new program, Matter-to-Life, to fund projects that sharpen scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter.
For some of us, the program sounds like a storyline pulled from a speculative fiction novel. But for foundation President Adam Falk, it encapsulates the funder’s finely tuned approach to research grantmaking. “The program is very interdisciplinary and speculative, and some of the grants are really risky, but we think it is very exciting science,” Falk told me in an early October Zoom call.
Established in 1934 by industrialist Alfred P. Sloan, the New York City-based foundation funds research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics. From 2021 to 2023, it approved an annual average of $88 million in grants across five program areas — Research ($48.3 million), Higher Education ($12.9 million), Public Understanding ($12.9 million), Technology ($10.5 million) and its NYC Program ($2.6 million), plus $1 million in grants made outside of its established programs.
In addition, its two-year, $75,000 Sloan Research Fellowships support 126 untenured faculty across seven disciplines. In one of the more compelling returns on investment in modern philanthropy, more than 50 former fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes. “That’s a group,” Falk said somewhat understatedly, “that can benefit disproportionately from a relatively small amount of money.”
Our conversation hit on an array of topics, including the foundation’s penchant for time-limited programs, how funders focused on advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in higher ed should proceed in today’s charged climate, and AI’s impact on the field of science.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The foundation runs some pretty forward-looking programs. I can’t help but think of the old adage that philanthropy can act as society’s risk capital.
I think there are two things that are covered by the idea of risk. One is projects that are risky, and the other is projects that are speculative.
A risky project is technically very difficult. You want an answer, but the odds that this experiment will succeed might not be great. What I mean by speculative is an experiment where you’re looking for something that might or might not be there. It’s a bit of a fishing expedition. Or if the fish were there, they’d be really exciting fish.
Both of those projects can get triaged out of a very competitive federal grantmaking process, so that’s where philanthropy can step in. And to be clear, I don’t think we’re better or smarter than the federal agencies. It’s just that we have a little bit more latitude and know where there’s opportunity after the federal government has done its grantmaking.
We’re looking for these interstitial spots in the landscape where there’s good or potentially good science that isn’t getting funded, and that’s the sense in which we can be risk capital.
You mentioned the federal grantmaking process, and it speaks to the familiar narrative that philanthropy has to swoop in and help grantees grappling with diminished funding opportunities out of Washington.
I think it depends on the field in question. The ability to think of interesting things to do is always going to grow much faster than budgets to do them.
In biomedicine, for example, the pool of NIH funding hasn’t kept up with the growing demand from investigators, so it’s increasingly a struggle for individual researchers to be funded.
My view is that philanthropy can’t make up for diminutions or perceived diminutions in federal funding. We don’t have close to enough zeros to do that. But what we can do is to look for structural gaps where we can make a difference. The Simons Foundation, which is much larger than us and only funds in science, is in a position to have a structural impact in mathematics relative to the federal government.
Sloan takes a time-limited approach toward segments of its portfolio. Can you talk about the thinking here?
For the most part, we see our grantmaking programs as having a finite lifetime roughly set by a decade. That’s not a strict number, and there are exceptions. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been going on for about 30 years.
We started the Matter-to-Life program after other grantmaking programs came to an end, like Chemistry of Indoor Environments and the Deep Carbon Observatory. We were coming in for a finite length of time to try to nucleate a field and get some activity started, then we exit and let other funders do the work from there.
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Turning to Sloan’s Higher Education program, its goal is to “create diverse, equitable, and inclusive pathways to and through STEM graduate education and the professoriate.” How has the program evolved in recent years?
We focus largely on doctoral education because we think it’s really important that the professoriate in these fields become more diverse, and that can’t happen unless we train more Ph.D.s.
The first phase of this work was the Minority Ph.D. program, which started in 1996. We supported a lot of students who would not otherwise have had the resources that we gave them, but we didn’t feel like it was enough. So the second phase, University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring, started a little more than 10 years ago. We gave grants to eight universities to support students, build cohorts and give these institutions the resources to change their practices and culture.
The idea there was to focus not just on individual change, but on systemic change, so that we would leave behind something that was different in those universities in terms of the support for underrepresented students in the sciences. And we found that happened for many of the universities we’ve funded.
I checked out Sloan’s higher ed grantmaking priorities and noticed how pursuing systems change is a consistent throughline for the work.
Our next iteration of STEM graduate education, Sloan Centers for Systems Change, tries to lean even harder into this idea. It’s about changing the environment that students are in, but also by looking at systemic issues such as the way funding or mentoring is structured.
The truth is that it’s hard to look at an initiative like that and say, “Three years from now, life is going to be different in these departments.” But we think that by funding the work and funding it so visibly, we can encourage people in the STEM higher ed system to make their institutions more inclusive.
And let me just say one more thing about our approach, because it’s worth clarifying in this environment. We believe that everywhere we make a grant, each grantee has the opportunity to improve the climate, the inclusiveness and the diversity of their organization or community of practice. We insist that they tell us how they’re going to do that because when we leave an area, we want to leave a more inclusive and healthier scientific ecosystem behind.
In September, the venture capital group Fearless Fund and its Fearless Foundation settled with the American Alliance for Equal Rights, which sued the fund, claiming its Fearless Strivers Grant Contest for Black women business owners was discriminatory. What are your thoughts on the issue?
We’re in a slightly different place than Fearless, so I’ll leave them out. What I will say is that I think it’s incredibly important that foundations be brave in this moment.
In an environment where institutions are coming under tremendous pressure, especially at the state level, to scale back work around diversity, equity and inclusion, funders have the freedom to stand up for the importance of this work.
We would never put a grantee in legal jeopardy. They have to tell us what they can do legally or what risk they can’t take. And for grantees that can’t take certain risks, we’ll work with them on that. But we as a funder don’t need to back down from that conversation.
I think one of the effects of the Supreme Court [affirmative action] decision has been a dramatic overreaction from some institutions about what they can and can’t do. There’s a much wider space of work that is not affected by this decision. I’ll give you one example. There’s nothing in the decision that says you cannot recruit as hard as you want, before or after admissions, in minority communities. But some institutions have backed off from that kind of activity for no good reason other than being very afraid of being sued.
My last question, not surprisingly, involves AI. How are folks at the foundation thinking about the technology?
The first thing I’d say is that what AI means to people changes every few years. So right now, what people mean is large language models. A few years ago, they meant pattern recognition in big data analysis. Around the foundation, we try to be specific about what we mean.
It’s very important to understand these technologies as tools. These are not “thinking computers,” and people sometimes use language that confuses the issue. A large language model doesn’t “hallucinate.” A large language model makes mistakes. It’s an important distinction. There’s nothing that comes out of a large language model that wasn’t put into the large language model on the other end.
So what interests us at the foundation isn’t if our robot overlords take us over, but how this technology is being used to write papers, generate hypotheses, or to organize streams of activity. One of the worries we have is that it can produce output that seems like it was produced by a human, and that has implications for teaching and scientific literature. So while there are all sorts of challenges and opportunities that it presents, we’re mostly interested in the ways people are using it to do science.
