The PhRMA Foundation Faculty Starter Grant in Drug Delivery offers financial support to individuals beginning independent careers at the faculty level at an accredited U.S. university in drug delivery research, including basic pharmaceutics, biopharmaceutics, pharmaceutical technology, pharmaceutical biotechnology, or biomedical engineering. Applicants must be within the first five years of their independent status.
Deadline for LOI: April 15, 2025
Eligibility Requirements
- Applicants (U.S. and non-U.S. citizens) must be full-time, promotion-eligible, research-intensive faculty at a PhD and/or MS degree-granting accredited U.S. university by the time of award activation. (Awards may be activated between January 1, 2026, and August 1, 2026.)
- You are not eligible if your faculty status began before January 1, 2023.
- Applicants who have taken leave from their career (e.g., parenting of a child, childbirth, long-term care of a parent/spouse/child/dependent, personal health issues) that puts them outside of the eligibility time frame can reach out to PhRMA Foundation staff ahead of their LOI submission to determine their eligibility. The Foundation aims to be flexible and adjust these time frames if necessary and appropriate.
- Applicants must be eligible to apply for independent external research funding by their university.
- Applicants should not have other substantial sources of research funding, excluding intramural funding or start-up funding from their university. Applicants are ineligible if they are the principal investigator (PI) of an R or K series award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, or other significant financial award from any grant-making institution. Generally, funding over $150,000 a year is considered substantial, unless you are the PI of a grant where funds go to training others. If this is the case, explain in your extended letter.
- The Foundation will not consider multiple applications for similar efforts on the same project. For instance, if a predoc, postdoc, and faculty member from the same lab are all submitting applications for proposed efforts on the same project, the efforts must be separate activities and not duplicative.
Amount Description
- The grant provides funding of $100,000 for one year