The Country's Oldest Science Philanthropy Plays the Long Game by Supporting Young Scientists

The Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) is the country’s first and oldest philanthropic foundation devoted to basic sciences. But it’s not as well known as, say, a Kavli or a Simons, maybe in small part due to its somewhat confusing name. Why the seemingly incongruous “corporation” moniker? When the funder was established, way back in 1912, modern American foundation law hadn’t yet been fully developed. Even so, for the last 110 years, RCSA has remained philanthropy’s steadiest supporter of basic scientific research.

RCSA was established by Frederick Gardner Cottrell (1877-1948), a UC Berkeley chemistry professor who, among his many accomplishments, invented the electrostatic precipitator, a device that uses an electrostatic charge to remove pollutants from the exhaust gases belching out of industrial smokestacks. The technology is still in use today. Cottrell produced and sold the electrostatic precipitators to great, if not tycoon-level, success. Evidently a born philanthropist, he decided to use the business profits to advance science and scientists. That was the genesis of the RCSA.

Today, with about $216 million in assets, the RCSA can’t compete in terms of dollars with the higher-profile, multibillion-dollar science foundations. But it has stuck to its mission and despite its comparatively modest funding it has over the years made a difference to many researchers at a point in their career when a little bit of support and recognition meant a lot.

RCSA currently operates two main programs in service of its mission to advance early stage, high-potential, basic scientific research: the Cottrell Scholars, and Scialog.

Cottrell Scholars supports early-career faculty scientists in the years leading up to their tenure. The program provides $100,000 over a period of three years with a good deal of discretion for the scientist; typically, the award goes to about 24 scholars annually. Scialog is a year-long, cross-disciplinary program designed to solve key issues in basic science fields by bringing scientists together in annual meetings, further aiming to foster long-term partnerships and cooperation.

We spoke recently with RCSA President Daniel Linzer to get a better idea of the foundation’s work and goals for the future. Here are five takeaways.

The Cottrell Scholars program supports researchers in astronomy, chemistry and physics.

Scientists with faculty appointments in these three primary fields of interest are eligible to be Cottrell Scholars; they may have dual appointments in different departments as long as one of the appointments is in astronomy, chemistry or physics. However, through its Scialog program, RCSA engages with scientists from many disciplines beyond their three fields of primary interest.

The focus is on early-career scientists.

Both of the funder’s main programs, Cottrell Scholars and Scialog, are designed to help newer principal investigators during the years prior to tenure, but they still need to show a track record of creativity and success. Researchers aren’t eligible to apply to the Cottrell program, for example, until the end of their third year on the faculty. “While your graduate student and postdoc record is important,” Linzer said, “what we’re looking for is, ‘What have you done as an independent principal investigator? How have you set up your research group? Are you doing new science? Are you going in interesting directions?’”

Significantly, to encourage pursuit of new research ideas, Cottrell Scholars’ funding is flexible — much more so than NIH and other government research grants, for example, which, for good or ill, have become more restrictive. “When I was an assistant professor,” Linzer said, “it was allowable to use your NIH grant to start a new research direction. And today, you get arrested for that.” Unfortunately, that restriction makes it tougher for researchers to pursue new ideas, he said. So RCSA also provides additional small grants beyond the primary Cottrell support to encourage pursuit of new research ideas.

The RCSA considers teaching to be just as important as the research.

Faculty at research institutions often consider teaching to be something of a necessary evil, a chore to be tolerated in order to pursue their main focus of research. This is a view that RCSA would like to change. “The first thing we read in a Cottrell application is not the scientific proposal,” said Linzer. “It’s the educational proposal.” The RCSA reviewers want to know that applicants are thinking about student learning — and about innovations that address problems in teaching and learning in their fields. “A lot of scientists are flummoxed by that,” said Linzer. “But it’s our expectation that successful applicants will apply the same approach to teaching that they use for research — know the literature, have some ideas of where you could have an impact, design an intervention that you think will work, measure the outcome, if it doesn’t work, try something else. We’re looking for that kind of commitment to teaching.”

DEI is increasingly baked into RCSA’s programs, but it’s still a work in progress.

Academia has long been acknowledging that minority racial and ethnic groups are underrepresented in science fields, but diversity has increased slowly and only slightly. For its part, RCSA leadership is working to develop initiatives that drive diversity, equity and inclusion in the physical sciences of chemistry, physics and astronomy, areas that have historically been overwhelmingly white and male. “We embed that in our existing programs,” said Linzer. “For example, as we build Scialog cohorts, we’ve achieved 50% gender parity, and that was not the case five years ago. But we are still way off in underrepresented minority participation.”

The RCSA wants to advance the culture of academic research by fostering cross-discipline collaboration.

The RCSA launched its Scialog program in 2010, in large part to address the unique professional stresses on scientists, particularly early-career faculty who must balance research, teaching and service to their departments and schools. “Science had become ultra-competitive for funding and getting publications, with people worrying about creating a name for themselves en route to tenure,” Linzer said. “RCSA was trying to find ways to make science fun again, to make it a collaborative, cooperative, discovery-focused activity instead of a competitive and protective activity.”

Scialog brings together several dozen junior faculty in a series of multiyear initiatives, punctuated by in-person conferences that address important subtopics or problems within broader fields. Current Scialog subjects include bioimaging, the microbiome and neurobiology, zoonotic threats, among others. “Those subtopics would be areas where there were real hurdles that had to be overcome in order to move the field forward,” said Linzer. “And by discussing them from different perspectives, with people that come from different fields and methodologies, scientists can gain perspectives on possibilities they might not have seen if they were working alone. People have to sit down and talk with each other for a while to learn each other’s scientific language.”

All told, through Scialog, RCSA supports and involves hundreds of scientists a year, from all fields, to build interdisciplinary communities that can attack problems with complementary expertise and methodologies. RCSA partners with other top science funders to mount Scialog, among them Heising-Simons Foundation, Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Walder Foundation, the Kavli Foundation, as well as public entities like the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Featured