News

W. M. Keck Foundation Provides Bridge Funding to Support Early Career Scientists Amid Federal Funding Uncertainty:

The W. M. Keck Foundation announced $76 million in total grantmaking for 2025, including a one-time bridge funding initiative designed to support early career scientists navigating reductions in federal research funding. The special initiative increased the Foundation’s annual investment in basic research grants by over 50 percent.

Through its Keck Scholar-Fellow Bridge Initiative, the Foundation provided two-year grants to 75 pairs of promising faculty members and their Ph.D. students at California institutions, funding doctoral student support and essential research expenses during a period of significant uncertainty in the federal funding landscape.

With this funding the Foundation aims to provide continuity in the research and training pipeline that drives American innovation.

In December 2025, the Foundation’s Board of Directors awarded 13 grants in the Research Program, totaling $15.4 million. Abstracts for these grants have been released. Congratulations to all our grantees this cycle!

In December 2025, the Foundation’s Board of Directors awarded grants to 12 organizations in Southern California, totaling $3.75 million. Summaries for these grants have been released. Congratulations to all our grantees this cycle!

Congratulations to Michel Devoret, recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics! Devoret won the prize for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit. The prize rewards the discovery and demonstration that quantum mechanical properties can be realized on a macroscopic scale with behaviors predicted by quantum mechanics. Devoret shares this year’s prize with John Clarke of UC Berkeley and John Martinis of Silicon Quantum Computing. The team’s work has provided a profound positive impact on the development of next-generation quantum technology.

In 2002, the W. M. Keck Foundation awarded a $1.2 million grant to Yale University to support an interdisciplinary project in coherence, control and noise in quantum information systems. Michel Devoret was one of six principal investigators supported by this initiative. The W. M. Keck Foundation is proud to have provided early funding to awardees of 11 Nobel prizes.

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Beth Pruitt as the Foundation’s inaugural Chief Scientific Officer. She joins us with an extraordinary record of scientific achievement, leadership, and strategic vision.

Dr. Pruitt holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and both an M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. She also completed postdoctoral training in microtechnology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.  Her academic career began at Stanford as a professor in Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering. In 2018, she joined the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she played a pivotal role in establishing the Department of Bioengineering and served as its Founding Chair.

Dr. Pruitt’s career is also distinguished by her service. A Navy R.O.T.C. scholar at MIT, she served as a U.S. Navy officer between her graduate degrees, with tours at the Navy’s nuclear engineering headquarters and teaching Systems Engineering and offshore sailing at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Her international experience includes a visiting professorship at ETH Zurich’s Lab for Applied Mechanobiology. Dr. Pruitt is the recipient of numerous honors, including the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Denice Denton Leadership Award, NSF BRITE Fellow Award, and the Emerald Foundation Distinguished Investigator Award. She is an elected Fellow of the AAAS, ASME, AIMBE, and BMES.

As Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Pruitt will lead the Foundation’s research strategy, foster scientific collaborations, and serve as a key ambassador for our mission. Her vision and expertise will be instrumental in shaping the future of our programs and expanding our impact across the scientific community.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Beth Pruitt to the Foundation.

In June 2025, the Foundation’s Board of Directors awarded grants to 17 organizations, totaling $19.6 million. Abstracts for these grants have been released. Congratulations to all our grantees this cycle!

11 grants were awarded in the Research Program, totaling $12.8 million. Abstracts for this cycle’s Research grants are available here.

6 grants were awarded in the Southern California Program, totaling $2 million. Abstracts for this cycle’s SoCal grants are available here. The Foundation granted an additional $4.8 million across 38 organizations to support wildfire recovery efforts in Los Angeles.