DIRECT NOMINATIONS

$75,000 in funding for two year fellowship awarded to early-career faculty judged to have the potential to revolutionize their fields.

Deadline: September 15, 202

KEY FACTS

Award: $75,000 over two years, paid to the institution

Who Nominates: A department head or other senior researcher

Application Deadline: Passed for the 2027 cycle; next deadline is September 2028

Institutional Cap: No more than three candidates per department, per field

WHO ENDORSES

One nomination letter from a department head or other senior researcher. Submissions without it are not accepted at all. Plus three letters of support from other researchers, preferably not all at the same institution. Sloan tells its committees directly that letters from co-authors, personal associates and mentors are less useful than letters from scholars with professional distance from the work.

ELIGIBILITY

A PhD in economics or a related field. Faculty membership at a degree-granting institution in the United States or Canada. Tenure-track, but untenured as of September 15 of the nomination year. A faculty position carrying a regular teaching obligation. Candidates are normally several years past the PhD, far enough along to have a competitive record of independent research.

NOMINATION REQUIREMENTS

A nomination letter from a department head or other senior researcher. Three letters of support, preferably from researchers who do not share a direct personal relation to the nominee and can speak objectively about their work. An up-to-date CV. A research statement and two journal articles. Papers need not be published, but successful candidates rarely submit work that has not at least been accepted.

TIMING

The candidate tpically submits by the September deadline. An application missing only a letter is still accepted so long as the letter has been formally requested through the portal. Letters cannot be reused from a previous year's application.

Official source: sloan.org/fellowships 

NSF's most prestigious award for pre-tenure faculty, and in many departments a near-decisive data point in the tenure case.

KEY FACTS

Award: $400,000 minimum over five years

Who Nominates: The faculty member, with a mandatory departmental letter

Application Deadline: Fourth Wednesday in July, annually

Lifetime limit: Three reviewed proposals

ABOUT THE AWARD

The CAREER program runs across every NSF directorate and makes roughly 500 awards a year. Fewer than one in five proposals is funded. It supports early-career faculty who can serve as academic role models in both research and education.

WHO ENDORSES

One departmental letter from the department head, confirming eligibility and committing the department's own resources to the education plan. This is the only award on the page where the endorsement is institutional rather than peer, and where a generic letter measurably weakens the case, because a panel reads it as the department declining to back the idea.

ELIGIBILITY

A doctoral degree in an NSF-supported field, conferred and in hand by the deadline. At least a 50% tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent appointment at the rank of assistant professor. Untenured as of the deadline. Associate professors are ineligible whether tenured or not. No previous CAREER award, no co-PIs, one proposal per annual competition. A maximum of three reviewed proposals in a career, which for most assistant professors means three attempts before the tenure clock runs out.

NOMINATION REQUIREMENTS

A 15-page project description integrating research and education, references cited for both halves, a biosketch covering both, a budget justification, and the mandatory departmental letter. Proposals are returned without review for a missing departmental letter, a co-PI on the cover page, a missing prior-support section, or late submission.

SELF-NOMINATION DRIVEN

This is an application the faculty member writes, not a nomination someone else submits. BFI's contribution is upstream and internal: eligibility and attempt tracking, a specific rather than boilerplate departmental letter, and red-team review by a colleague who has sat on an NSF panel.

TIMING

Traditionally, the deadline falls on the fourth Wednesday in July. However, BFI will monitor for when the 2027 deadline drops. Internal routing deadlines typically fall seven to ten business days earlier.

Official source: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/career-faculty-early-career-development-program/nsf22-586/solicitation, CAREER program solicitation NSF 22-586

Five-thousand-dollar awards at three Society for Financial Studies journals for papers whose authors are all within six years of their PhD or current appointment.

KEY FACTS

Award: $5,000 at each journal

Who Nominates: No nomination; the author elects at the point of submission

Application Deadline: None

Eligibility: No author more than six years past PhD or current appointment

Journals: Review of Financial Studies, RAPS, RCFS

ABOUT THE AWARDS

Each of the three SFS journals runs its own Rising Scholar Award for a published paper on which no author received either their current academic appointment or their most recent PhD more than six years before the paper was submitted to that journal. Winners are chosen by a vote of the full editorial board. Also, the paper must have been published in an issue by the end of the year preceding the year in which the award is issued.

WHO ENDORSES

Nobody. Eligibility is claimed by the author, not nominated.

IMPORTANT APPLICATION NOTE

Eligible authors must select Rising Scholar Award as the category of submission when the paper is submitted. If they forget, the fix is to contact the journal's Managing Editor, but nobody does that if they did not know the award existed. The failure mode here is purely administrative, which is why it is on this page.

ELIGIBILITY TIMING

The six-year window is measured at the time of submission, not publication, so a paper can remain eligible even if it appears in print later. Worth checking rather than assuming.

Official source: sfs.org, Review of Financial Studies Rising Scholar Award