How the Sloan Foundation picks scientific winners
- Matt von Hippel
- Jun 18
- 7 min read
Sloan Foundation president Adam Falk is stepping down this year after seven years leading the iconic organization. He spoke with FirstPrinciples about how the foundation’s philosophy has given it an outsized impact on scientific progress.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has been a fixture in philanthropy for almost a century. Founded in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr. at the height of his career as CEO of General Motors, the foundation was built to fuel prosperity the way Sloan thought was most impactful: by advancing knowledge. In pursuit of that mission, the foundation has nucleated new interdisciplinary fields, like neuroscience and behavioral economics, supported new ways of doing things like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Jupyter notebooks for accessible Python programming, and supported promising young scholars, many of whom go on to win prestigious awards.
The legacy of Alfred P. Sloan
Sloan began his career as a draftsman in a machine shop making ball bearings for automobiles. As the industry consolidated, he rose through the ranks in successive companies, applying a systematic philosophy to management that would strongly inform how he shaped his foundation.
“His purposes in founding it really mirror his idea of how progress was made in corporations,” said Adam Falk, the current president of the foundation, "His understanding of business was that it proceeded best when it was done based on evidence."
That understanding led Sloan to create an organization with a scholarly mandate. Under Sloan, the foundation began with a focus on the discipline of economics, supporting both research and education to improve the general public’s understanding. Soon, though, Sloan began to fund other promising fields. He funded biomedical research in its early days, before there was significant government funding, and in 1955 he established the Sloan Research Fellowships, giving young scholars two years of support to use as they thought best. These fellowships have continued to this day, and have a strong track record of finding researchers who are poised to excel. Among the 6,396 past Sloan Fellows there have been 47 Nobel Prizes, 12 Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economics, and a slew of other prestigious awards in mathematics and the sciences.
Today, Sloan would be considered a bit of a political anomaly. Neither left-wing or right-wing by today’s standards, Sloan wanted individuals who were empowered to reason about the world. That led him to oppose Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he viewed as insufficiently aligned with individual responsibility, but it also led him to fund education for underprivileged groups, giving money to women’s colleges and the United Negro College Fund.
For the foundation, Sloan’s philosophy is still at the core of what they do. It means they have a strong commitment to nonpartisanship, but at the same time a central part of their mission is to expand educational opportunity for all. It means they try to find key new ideas that can lead to transformative change, both in science and in society. It means they stick to their principles, but keep flexible in a changing world. For the foundation’s staff, the question of what “Mr. Sloan” would value is always at the forefront, adapted to a world he couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
"It's his vision of what he wanted to do that we're trying to instantiate in the modern world," said Falk.
Looking where others aren't: Sloan’s approach to scientific funding
While the Sloan foundation funded biomedical research in its early days, it dropped the field in the early 1960’s while Sloan was still alive. That wasn’t because Sloan thought biomedical research was unimportant. Instead, it was due to recognition that compared to US government institutions like the National Institutes of Health (which almost quintupled their budgets between 1955 and 1960), the Sloan Foundation’s contribution would be minor.
That recognition continued to guide the foundation in the years to come. The Sloan Foundation gives around $90 million a year, an amount that may seem large but is five hundred times smaller than the US government’s typical budget for basic research. As a result, the foundation looks for areas that are overlooked by the big funding agencies, where they can make an outsized difference.
At any given time, the Sloan Foundation has a handful of scientific programs, each under a Program Director. The programs change over time as directors retire and new directors join, with a typical program lasting five to ten years.
Some of the foundation’s biggest success stories have been in nurturing interdisciplinary research, which often has trouble finding a fit within conventional sources of funding. Their program in neuroscience is a typical example: begun in 1969 when there was little dedicated funding, the foundation’s support allowed the field to grow. They played a similar role in the beginning of the field of behavioral economics with a 1985-1989 program, where the iconic academic duo Kahneman and Tversky were first introduced by a program director at the Sloan Foundation headquarters.
Other times, the foundation’s funding allows new scientific infrastructure to be created. For a beginning user of Python, Jupyter notebooks offer a convenient way to experiment with code and data. This open-source technology would not have been funded by industry, and needed support of an organization like Sloan, and they have championed other open-source projects along similar lines.
While most Sloan programs last five years, there is one notable exception. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey was founded in 2000, and still pursues its mission, gathering images across the entire sky and distributing data to astronomers. When the survey began, most astronomic data wasn’t kept digitally, and was largely analyzed by individual astronomers. As Falk described the attitude of the time, “astronomy is, you've got a big telescope and a plate! And you expose the plate, and then it's your plate.”
The Sloan Foundation changed that. By recording the data digitally and distributing it freely after a year, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey ushered in a new era of open and collaborative astronomy.
“If you're wise, you can not just fund different topics in science, but fund different ways of doing things,” said Falk.
Hands-on philanthropy is key to the Sloan Foundation’s success
Falk was brought on to lead the Sloan Foundation in 2018. With a background in theoretical particle physics, he was a professor at Johns Hopkins for eight years before he moved to the administrative side of the university, serving as Dean of Faculty, then Dean of Arts and Sciences. The change of focus turned out to be a good fit.
“Your job goes from your own work to supporting other peoples' work,” said Falk, “and I discovered I like that I really like supporting other peoples' work.”
Falk continued supporting others’ work as president of Williams College, before moving to Sloan to have more impact on cutting-edge research. He credits the foundation’s success to the strength of its team.
“You make great grants and have great programs if you have a great set of program directors who individually lead their programs really well and who work together really well,” said Falk.
The foundation’s approach is extraordinarily hands-on, and extraordinarily collegial. Most of the program directors have PhDs, and keep a close eye on the disciplines they fund. The directors talk things over with potential grantees, working together to develop a proposal, then bring that proposal to a meeting of all of the directors and the president. The proposals are read by everyone, and the most promising options are sent out for review, then discussed again. The end result is that each program director is aware of the big picture, creating a shared culture and philosophy.
“That level of collective consideration of the grants," said Falk, "that is unusual."
The staff of each program is extremely lean. Each program director has a program associate, who is usually a recent PhD in the field covered by the program, and an assistant to handle administrative tasks. That tiny staff, just three people per program, distributes twelve to fifteen million dollars over 30-40 grants each year.
It’s a structure that prioritizes engaged decision-making over rote procedure. And for a foundation that tries to find diamonds in the scientific rough, it has served them well.
Research, the public, and the future
One of Falk’s initiatives was to change the foundation’s annual reports. Originally a long list of grants, Sloan now publishes highlights telling stories about some of the most exciting work they fund. While the foundation isn’t funded by tax money, Falk thought it was important that they reach out to the public nonetheless.
“We have an obligation to be better storytellers about the work we're doing,” said Falk.
That obligation is a longstanding mission of the foundation, with a program supporting the public understanding of science. Among other activities, they provide early funding to help authors write books for the public on scientific topics, a standout example being the book Hidden Figures.
It is a critical time for public science advocacy, with deep cuts threatened for science funding in the US. While these cuts do not affect the foundation directly, they change the ecosystem, which has implications for the foundation’s approach.
“The name of the game is to look at the landscape of scholarship that's out there. How is it funded? What is interesting that is not being funded? How do you work to find the points of opportunity in that landscape? But you have to have a landscape,” said Falk. “We're in a moment now that it's harder to know five years from now what that landscape will look like.”
Sloan, as a foundation, has to try to play the long game. They give what they can year after year, while maintaining their ability to give in the future.
“Twenty-five to thirty years from now, when there are needs that are going to be just as great as the needs we have now, there should be another opportunity for future staff here to do things that are just as impactful,” said Falk.
Matt von Hippel is a science journalist based in Copenhagen with a background in particle physics. He blogs weekly at 4gravitons.com, and has written for Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, and Ars Technica.
