Science drives progress across all fields: bettering lives, priming our economic engine, and bringing enlightenment to the world. Investing in professionals engaged in the scientific process is the most reliable way to ensure that answers to important, descriptive questions are revealed. These answers drive smarter, data-informed decisions and ultimately advance civilization, sometimes incrementally, sometimes providing extraordinary leaps forward. With ample support, scientists conducting research can devote themselves fully to this calling, pursuing new ideas and uncharted paths.

To catalyze scientific research and discovery, we support and partner with organizations engaged in Early-Stage Research and Research in Other PCLB Programs.

Early-stage Research: When scientists are early in their careers or are early in exploring new questions, funding can be especially hard to secure. Yet, this sort of early-stage research is critical to developing our next generation of scientists and to making new scientific discoveries.

More specifically, PCLB currently supports:

• Research Incubators – Provide fellowship programs that enable scientists to engage in basic research and make scientific discoveries across a breadth of fields and topics.
• Research Institutions – Operate flagship fellowship and research programs at the Smithsonian Institute and John Hopkins University, two institutions that our founder, Dr. Peter Buck, personally supported.
• Research in Other PCLB Programs: Believing in the power of research and the value of data-informed decisions, PCLB funds research projects that inform both our own grant-making and the work of the direct service organizations that we fund. We support a limited number of projects each year to help answer important questions connected to our other program areas.