Deadlines
Concept Submission: September 2, 2025
Acceptance/Rejection Notification: September 26, 2025
Final Proposal Submission: October 23, 2025
Description
The purpose of the Thrasher Research Fund Early Career Award is to encourage the development of researchers in child health by awarding small grants to new researchers, helping them gain a foothold in this important area. The goal is to fund applicants who will go on to be independent investigators.
The Fund is open to a wide variety of research topics. We do not focus on a particular disease, but all our funded projects deal directly with children’s health. In the Early Career Award Program, the Fund is particularly interested in applicants that show great potential to impact that field of children’s health through medical research. Both an applicant’s aptitude and inclination toward research are considered. The quality of the mentor and the mentoring relationship are also considered to be important predictors of success.
Purpose
All applications are expected to have a novel, scientifically sound, hypothesis-driven approach. Projects should be feasibly accomplished between 1-2 years.
In the Discovery/Development/Delivery paradigm, most of our grants fall into the Development category, though excellent applicants in the Discovery and Delivery categories are occasionally funded.
- Discovery: Mechanisms and pathways, biomarker target identification, gene identification, descriptive ‘-omics
- Development: Therapeutics, interventions, diagnostics, clinically relevant biomarker validation
- Delivery: Implementation science, operations research, health services, quality improvement.
Eligibility
Those eligible to apply include:
- Physicians who are in a residency/fellowship training program, or who completed that program no more than one year before the Concept Paper deadline.
- Post-doctoral researchers who received the doctoral level degree no more than three years before the Concept Paper deadline.
We calculate eligibility by the year, ie. if you finished fellowship in July 2024 you are eligible to apply through all of 2025. Extensions may be granted for parental, family, or medical leave. Please contact the fund to discuss your specific case.
Budget Guidelines
- The grant amount is based on the actual budgetary needs of the project, with a maximum of $25,000 in direct costs for the entire grant. The duration of the project can be up to two years. Indirect costs of no more than 7% of direct costs will be paid on Early Career Award Program grants, for a maximum total budget of $26,750.
- Up to $12,500 in total of the proposed budget may be used for salary (including fringe) of the new researcher. Funds not needed for salary are to be used for research supplies or other research-related expenses.
- The cost of attending conferences are allowed for the applicant to report findings resulting from Thrasher-supported research. Such travel costs may not exceed $2,000.
- Publication costs are allowed with a cap of $2,500.
- Tuition is allowed on a case by case basis for high level, specific courses or training programs pertaining to the grant aims. Requests need approval from the fund and require justification.
- Requests for purchase of major equipment (single items >$4,000) are discouraged and rarely funded.
For more information, please see the foundation website.