Bolstered Dean’s Competitive Fund awards promising research

Applications for the Dean’s Competitive Fund (DCF) for Promising Scholarship doubled this academic year to a record 196, a surge directly corresponding to Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra’s decision to bolster support from $4 million to $8 million for 2025–26.

The review committee doled out roughly half that pool in December to nearly 50 fall-cycle recipients, awards that will fund promising research across disciplines, including septic shock caused by bacterial infections, the development of artisan practices in early modern South Asia, and the flow of luxury goods alongside the Atlantic slave trade. Spring grants will be announced in May.

As a new assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science, Eric Moses Gurevitch learned about the program at orientation. He was in the process of publishing a book on medieval South Asia that grew from his University of Chicago doctoral research, and he had done preliminary research to pivot to an envisioned second book — about South Asian artisans in the early modern period, roughly 1450 to 1750.

Coppersmiths and other artisans were omitted from most histories of the period because they typically hailed from caste-marginalized backgrounds, overlooked out of scholarly bias and the presumption that they left no written record due to illiteracy. Gurevitch had done enough probing to discover that they had indeed left records — waiting in archives scattered across India, albeit untranslated and undigitized. “It’s slower and more expensive to do archival research beyond the United States and Europe, but in many ways it’s more rewarding and exciting,” Gurevitch said.

Open to professors in the FAS and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the Dean’s Competitive Fund represents one small piece of a sponsored research pie at Harvard that amounted to $1 billion annually in federal, foundation, and corporate support — prior to the Trump administration’s effort to freeze or cancel funding — and an additional $526 million in Harvard funds in fiscal year 2024, the most recent available.

But it has filled an outsized niche for faculty by providing a nimble source of funding that can be tapped without lengthy applications, long waiting periods, and tall odds of major federal and foundation grants. Recipients — who submit a one-page proposal along with a CV and budget — are notified within a few months.

And those two types of funding are not mutually exclusive. Many candidates use DCF awards to seed projects that eventually win larger federal or foundation grants — or, in the case of scientific research, to learn that an initial study might not merit going any further. Either way, “all of that is to the benefit of the taxpayer,” said Vinothan Manoharan, committee chair and the Wagner Family Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Physics.

Former FAS dean Michael D. Smith started the program as a $2.5 million annual pool — from discretionary dollars supported by FAS donors — in 2016, when academic researchers were encouraged to “diversify their portfolios” because of what seemed like headwinds in federal funding. It had reached $4 million before Hoekstra doubled it last May.

In her May 2025 message to faculty, Hoekstra wrote that “we must adapt to a new world where our sources of research funding will need to change, but our commitments to academic excellence and high-impact discovery will not.”

The review committee considers the most critical needs and maximal impact, where $50,000 or $100,000 can make a huge difference. For a tenure-track assistant professor in the humanities or social sciences, it can enable research travel, convene a peer workshop, and provide the resources to make headway on a book. For a veteran scientist, it might initiate a pioneering investigation that could otherwise languish before attracting enduring funding.

Past grants have supported a Gaelic folklore database and an open-source suite of astronomical software, research into industrial psychology in modern China and the careful opening of a 3,000-year-old coffin — revealing a previously unknown painting of the ancient Egyptian sun god Ra-Horakhty.

The December round included a seed award for Dan Kahne, Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, to pay a research associate and cover supplies and lab services while investigating new approaches to treating septic shock caused by bacterial infections. Cécile Fromont, a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, received a bridge grant to resume a pandemic-paused project, to research European and African metalwork, textiles, and luxury goods created in the context of the Atlantic slave trade.

Gurevitch hopes his project will merit funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities or the National Science Foundation, but that could be years off. For now, the DCF award will support his research and writing as well as the development of a workshop to foster dialogue among scholars who study early modern technologies around the world.

“This has allowed me to come to Harvard and hit the ground running,” he said.