News from RCSA: January 2024

News from RCSA

In 2023, RCSA and its funding partners awarded more than $9.5 million to early career scientists in the United States and Canada through RCSA’s two core programs, the Cottrell Scholar Program and Scialog. These partnerships included the Azrieli Foundation, the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ClimateWorks Foundation, the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, The Kavli Foundation, NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Walder Foundation.

Read our 2023 Awards Summary

Recent Awards

Scialog: Mitigating Zoonotic Threats

RCSA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture made awards to six multidisciplinary teams of early career scientists to launch new research in the detection and mitigation of emerging animal-borne infectious diseases in the final year of this Scialog series. Read more.

Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition

Seven collaborative teams won funding for projects to advance understanding of the molecular or mechanistic processes that underlie memory and cognition in the second year of this initiative. Read more.

Scialog: Negative Emissions Science

Seven cross-disciplinary teams won awards in the fourth and final year of this Scialog, which has already helped catalyze impactful outcomes advancing the underlying science needed to make greenhouse gas capture and utilization technologies globally scalable. Read more.

Our Latest Initiative

Creating Community with RCSA Fellows

RCSA is preparing to welcome the first cohort of participants in its RCSA Fellows initiative, a new effort to increase faculty diversity in the physical sciences in the United States and Canada through job search preparation and community building.

The initiative will support the academic career advancement of a group of postdoctoral scholars over a critical multi-year trajectory from postdoc to independent scientist: as they are preparing to look for faculty positions, as they are actively interviewing, and during their first year as newly independent tenure-track faculty investigators.

The initiative evolved from a successful Cottrell Scholar Collaborative project that RCSA funded in 2019.

The Year Ahead

RCSA plans to host five conferences in 2024:

April 11-14: Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories
May 21-23: RCSA Fellows Conference
July 17-19: 30th Annual Cottrell Scholar Conference
Sept. 4-7: Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials
Oct. 24-27: Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition
Nov. 14-17: Scialog: Early Science with the LSST