Russell Sage Foundation

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) has established a dissertation research grants (DRG) program to support innovative and high-quality dissertation research projects that address questions relevant to RSF’s priority areas: Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context; Future of Work; Race, Ethnicity and Immigration; Immigration and Immigrant Integration; and Social, Political, and Economic Inequality.

The Russell Sage Foundation, in partnership with the Economic Mobility and Opportunity program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, seeks to advance innovative research on economic mobility and access to opportunity in the United States. We are interested in research focused on structural barriers to economic mobility and how individuals, communities, and governments have come to understand, navigate, and challenge the existence of systemic inequalities.

RSF’s initiative on Computational Social Science supports innovative social science research that utilizes new data and methods to advance our understanding of the research issues that comprise its core social science programs in Social Inequality, Behavioral Economics, Future of Work, and Race, Ethnicity and Immigration. Limited consideration will be given to research that focuses primarily on methodologies, such as causal inference and innovations in data collection.

RSF will accept letters of inquiry (LOIs) under all of its core programs and special initiatives: Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context; Future of Work; Immigration and Immigrant Integration; Race, Ethnicity and Immigration; Social, Political, and Economic Inequality. In addition, RSF will also accept LOIs relevant to any of its core programs that address at least one of the following issues: research on the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting recession in the U.S. OR research focused on systemic racial inequality and/or the recent mass protests in the U.S.