Big Changes Underway at Kavli, Starting With a Program to Aid Scholars Escaping Global Strife
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cynthia friend, president of the Kavli foundation
When the Kavli Foundation announced last week the creation of a new program to support scholars whose research, livelihoods and perhaps even lives are threatened by war or other catastrophe, it was a recognition that academics are as vulnerable as anyone to destabilizing forces in the world. Known as the Kavli Scholars, the new program will support researchers fleeing dangerous and untenable situations resulting from threats like political persecution, war, climate change, civil unrest or natural disaster.
The program is not a huge one — the foundation has named two scholars so far, with plans to fund up to five at any given time, under a total expenditure of up to $200,000 per scholar. But it serves as an example of bigger changes underway at the 23-year-old science funder, part of a process that began at the start of 2021, when President Cynthia Friend assumed leadership from former foundation head Bob Conn. In a nutshell, the Kavli Foundation is no longer carrying out its longtime, signature program — endowing new Kavli Institutes at research universities around the world, having established a total of 20 over the years. Now, under Friend's direction, the organization is transitioning to a strategy of and more directly funding scientists and specific, promising lines of research within its focus areas — lines of research determined in large part by the Kavli science advisors and team.
Entering its third decade of funding, implementing the shift made sense as Friend took over from Conn, who served as foundation president from 2009 to 2021. "When I was hired,” Friend said, “the expectation was that I would look at things and do things differently." A key element of that different approach was not simply to increase what might be called a traditional grantmaking model, that is, direct funding for research projects — but one in which Kavli's scientific team would itself determine directions in research to fund within its fields of interest.
Friend, like many private science funders, wants Kavli to fund potentially valuable, but perhaps riskier research — the sort of work that more risk-averse public and private funding sources might not support. “If someone has an idea that is in its early stages that might seem a little out there, and you're not sure if it's going to work or not — that's the kind of thing that I think philanthropy should fund,” she said.
For Kavli, it's a matter of determining potentially fruitful research within the foundation's areas of scientific focus — astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience and theoretical physics. Much of the guidance on what to fund will come from colleagues working in the 20 Kavli Institutes — what Friend calls the foundation's “brain trust.”
“Our scientific staff looks at what's emerging in the scientific literature, and we convene meetings where we invite on the order of 30 people to discuss these fields to identify gaps,” Friend said. “And then we develop the funding opportunity. We're not just waiting for people to come to us.” Researchers do indeed approach Kavli for support, but the foundation will concentrate its funding in those areas of investigation that fit into its strategic scientific areas of focus.
What about the Kavli Institutes? While there won’t be any new ones established, the 20 existing institutes will soldier on within their respective research institutions, tapping into the endowments Kavli set up and expanded over time. That’s one advantage to the foundation’s long-running, unique strategy of seeding research institutes instead of cutting grant after grant — they’re gifts that keep on giving, regardless of what direction the foundation turns.
Now that Kavli’s board has decided that the strategy has run its course, Kavli is going to have a lot more money to give out in different ways. That’s in part because, after founder Fred Kavli passed away, the foundation’s assets roughly tripled in 2017. One thing that will continue, however, is the $1 million Kavli Prize, another signature program of the foundation, although Friend said she wants to drive awareness and to attract a more international slate of nominations.
The new Kavli Scholars program is an early example of the foundation stretching out a bit and finding creative ways to support the field. Under the program, the foundation will provide bridge support for scholars in partnership with its Kavli Institutes and other affiliates, including Kavli Prize Laureates. Kavli Scholars are selected based on their need and promise for transitioning to new work environments and must work in one of the foundation’s areas of scientific focus — astrophysics, theoretical physics, nanoscience and neuroscience. Prospective scholars must be nominated by someone already affiliated with Kavli, either an academic at one of the Kavli Institutes, a Kavli Prize recipient, or a Kavli-supported researcher. People eligible for support under the program include graduate students, postdocs and faculty.
Abraham Amiri, one of the initial Kavli Scholars, is a science communicator and is studying to be an astronomer. He fled Afghanistan after the Taliban took control, when he came under threat due to his national visibility in Afghan science outreach. He spent months in a refugee camp, seeking opportunities to pursue his education. Under sponsorship by David Jewitt, a 2012 Kavli Prize Laureate in Astrophysics and a professor of astronomy in UCLA’s Earth, Planetary, and Space Science Department, Amiri was accepted into UCLA to pursue a master's degree in planetary science.
Kavli Scholar Kateryna Vovk is a Ukrainian astrophysicist who studies active galactic nuclei. Shortly after the war in Ukraine broke out, Vovk’s grant funding was canceled, and she looked for ways to continue her work. Jia Liu, a professor at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, and John Silverman, professors at the University of Tokyo Kashiwa campus, sponsored Vovk for the Kavli Scholars program.
Friend said she started to think about the Kavli Scholars program because of the outpouring of support for scientists in Ukraine. "But I realized that Ukraine is not the only issue, and that (researchers under duress) is an ongoing issue." Even academics in the U.S. could be eligible for the program for any number of reasons — perhaps extreme weather or the shut-down of a researcher's lab. (Earlier this year, I wrote about a new Simons Foundation program to help hundreds of Ukrainian scientists and mathematicians as they struggled to conduct their work during wartime.)
Particularly valuable to the prospective scholars, Friend said, is the unrestricted nature of the funding and the speed with which Kavli can review the applications. "Those are two things that are really helpful to people who might find themselves in these situations," she said.
After two and a half years in the foundation's corner office, Friend says announcements like the Kavli Scholars program augur other new grantmaking programs to come. “What I'm doing now is to trying to pivot to this other model of identifying strategic areas that we can invest in, in our scientific fields,” she said. “And now, we're in the early stages of implementing that. So what we've been doing is identifying those fields to see where we think we can be most impactful and to now start making that happen. We'll have announcements to come.”
