Funder Spotlight: How the Beckman Foundation Gives an Early-Career Assist to Young Scientists

LIGHTFIELD STUDIOS/SHUTTERSTOCK

IP Funder Spotlights offer quick rundowns of grantmakers on our radar, including a few key details on how they operate and what they’re up to right now. Here’s a look at a science funder that’s all about supporting early-career scientists.

What this funder cares about

It’s not uncommon to see science-oriented foundations run a program that supports early-career researchers, usually along with other research funding programs, but for the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, helping young researchers is the whole mission.

Beckman is focused on this early stage of workforce development for researchers specializing in the fields of chemistry and the life sciences. In focus are undergraduate students, doctoral candidates, or recent Ph.D.s in chemistry, biology, biochemistry, or a host of related fields. That includes dozens of disciplines, among them biology, atmospheric and earth sciences, materials science, imaging and spectroscopy, and others.

Why you should care

The life of a newly minted academic scientist starts out with a bit of a catch-22: you can’t advance your career without winning research grants (particularly federal grants), but you can’t get the big grants unless you’ve done some research supporting the promise of your ideas. To counter this, philanthropic foundations and other funding entities have established funding programs specifically to help early-career investigators test their ideas and generate data that can lead to grants for larger studies—and to lifelong careers. So, it’s not just “publish or perish”; it’s also “get funded or get another profession.”

Where the money comes from

Arnold O. Beckman, born in 1900 in Illinois, received a doctorate in photochemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1928, staying on as an assistant professor. While teaching, he invented the acidimeter, which turned out to be an indispensable tool in analytical chemistry. He left teaching a few years later to focus full-time on the business of development and manufacture of scientific instruments for the study of chemistry and human biology, eventually founding Beckman Instruments.

In 1977, Arnold and Mabel Beckman established their foundation, making major grants to establish research centers at several top research institutions, as well as to the National Academy of Sciences. Then, in 1990, Arnold focused the foundation’s mission on the support of young researchers by funding innovative and high-risk research projects—which remains the organization’s current focus.

Where the money goes

Beckman’s current national funding programs include:

• Beckman Young Investigator Program – This program provides research support to the most promising young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences, particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science. This program will open for its next round of applications in the coming months.

• The Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Sciences or Chemical Instrumentation Award Program – Supports advanced research by postdoctoral scholars within the core areas of fundamental chemistry or the development and build of chemical instrumentation. This will also open its next application cycle in the coming months.

• The Beckman Scholars Program – A limited-submission, invitation-only program, consisting of a 15-month mentored research experience for exceptional undergraduate students in chemistry, biological sciences, or interdisciplinary combinations thereof. It provides $21,000 per student and $5,000 per mentor.

• Beckman Speaker and Conference Support Fund – This program, open to all current foundation grantees, to help them organize seminars or conferences at their institutions, specifically those that involve the participation of other Beckman program grantees and grantee alums.

In addition to the programs for young professional scientists, the Irvine, California-based Beckman Foundation also operates STEM and STEAM programs for school-age kids in its local Orange County, California, area. 

And in the past, Beckman has operated several programs to support the purchase of advanced imaging instruments, including cryogenic electron microscopy and light-sheet microscopy. These programs, along with the organization’s annual programs, reflect its mission to support young scientists and continue Arnold Beckman’s legacy of impact in scientific instrumentation.

What’s new at Beckman?

Like many other organizations in philanthropy and throughout society, Beckman has vowed to foreground its commitment to fairness through concrete measures intended to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion. As we’ve noted in other posts, such equity efforts are particularly important in scientific disciplines, which have long been dominated by white men, and are still necessary even years after universities have promised to boost diversity and inclusion.

You can read more about Beckman’s equity goals here; in coming weeks, the foundation intends to post additional details on their website about these measures.