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Internal Department Funding Opportunities

Dolores Gallagher-Thompson & Larry Wolford Thompson Caregiver Research and Practice Fund

Launched in 2024, this new request for proposals supports seed grants in the field of caregiver research and practice. Seed grants will focus on projects that will increase our understanding of the mental health needs of family caregivers of adults with chronic mental illness, substance use disorders, and/or physical illness. Specifically, we want to learn the stressors experienced by caregivers, and how this kind of caregiving affects the caregivers’ mental health so that appropriate interventions can be developed to reduce this stress and improve caregivers’ quality of life.

Trailblazing Trainee Award Program

Launched in 2020 as the Trainee Innovator Award Program, this program is designed to supplement existing opportunities for trainees in our department to pursue their personal research, scholarly, and professional development interests while reinforcing the department’s commitment to our five missions. 

Faculty Professional & Leadership Development Awards Program

Launched in 2020, this pilot program is intended to support the career development of early and mid-career faculty in our department who exhibit particular promise in advancing into leadership roles in academic medicine. 

Research Translation Accelerator Program (RTAP)

The Research Translation Accelerator Program (RTAP) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences is one example of how institutional and philanthropic support drives the incubation and transfer of the most innovative ideas out of the lab and into the broader world through commercial translation. RTAP was established to fill a critical funding gap by creating a bridge between academic research and commercial implementation. This bridge unleashes great potential to make transformative improvements in mental health and wellbeing.

iAsk Award Program

The iAsk (Innovator Award at Stanford by the Kedias), aimed at fueling and supporting innovation in the field of mental health, encourages investigators - at any stage in their career - to pursue novel ideas that push the boundaries of what we know, how we think about disease, and how we can improve brain health.

Departmental Innovator Grant Program

Launched in 2015, this program was designed to promote research and collaborative scholarly projects advancing the academic interests of our faculty and the strategic themes of our department.  Rebranded as the Departmental Innovator Grant Program in 2018, awards include Pilot Studies in novel scientific areas that have high potential to lead to competitive grant applications and Small Scholarly Projects related to education, clinical care, community outreach, and health systems issues, such as health care quality.

Research on Lyme Disease: Seed Grant Opportunity

The Stanford Lyme Working Group announced a new seed grant program in 2017 to advance research and innovation in Lyme Disease.  The seed grant program seeks to broadly stimulate research on Lyme Disease, with the goals of sparking new means of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of the condition and of examining the impact of Lyme Disease in the lives of individuals, families, and communities.  

Suicide Prevention through Outreach (SPOt)

The Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, in collaboration with the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and the Stanford Medicine Child Health Research Institute, invited applications for special projects focused on suicide prevention among youth in our community in 2017 and 2018. We sought innovative and collaborative projects for each category that are responsive to the CDC report and the need to provide resources and support for our local and regional community.

In October of 2017 and 2018, the program awarded faculty seed grants for special projects focused on suicide prevention among youth in our community. 

Jaswa Innovator Award for Early Career Investigators

The Jaswa Innovator Award is designed for early stage investigators (within 12 years of a first independent faculty appointment) who are interested in high-risk, fast-fail projects developing new technologies and platforms that may lead to better understanding, diagnosis and/or treatment of mental health disorders. We will soon announce selection of the inaugural recipient of the Jaswa Innovator Award for early career investigators.