The Kenneth Rainin Foundation has issued a request for applications for its Innovator Awards program.
This program provides early support for innovative ideas with the potential to lead to improvements in preventing, predicting, diagnosing and treating Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The Rainin Foundation encourages applications for high-impact basic and translational research projects that use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data analytics and various model systems to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms in IBD and accelerate therapeutic discovery in the field. Collaborative applications between scientists and clinicians in a variety of fields and expertise are highly encouraged, including immunologists, microbiologists, gastroenterologists, molecular biologists and computational biologists.
Up to $150,000 will be awarded for individual research projects, and up to $300,000 will be awarded for collaborative projects involving multiple investigators. Grantees who demonstrate significant progress in their first year of funding are eligible for up to two years of additional support.
Eligibility criteria include:
- Researchers from any scientific discipline are eligible to apply. If an applicant has not previously received funding for IBD-related research, it is strongly advised to include collaborators with expertise in IBD.
- Early career investigators, those who are new to the IBD field, and those who are part of one or more groups underrepresented in science are especially encouraged to apply.
- Postdocs are not eligible to apply as a Principal Investigator.
Please see RFP for full criteria.
To Apply:
- This is an open RFP (UCSF may submit an unlimited number of applications).
- Please email [email protected] to announce your intention to apply, then follow application instructions in RFP, conferring with your Grants Officer as needed.
- LOI deadline is Wednesday, September 30, 2026. If you are invited to submit a full application, the deadline will be February 5, 2027.
For more information and to review complete application instructions and eligibility requirements, please visit https://krfoundation.org/grants/funding-opportunities/innovator-awards/.