Fellowship Programs & Grants at the IGI
Fellowship Programs & Grants at the IGI
The IGI is committed to supporting early-career scientists through grant and fellowship programs that allow them to pursue some of their most creative approaches to solving real-world problems in health, agriculture, and climate. Several of our programs are focused on entrepreneurship as a key way to get technological innovations from the bench to the clinic or field.
Current Programs
The IGI-Hampton Summer Research Program in Genome Engineering, sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Graduate Diversity Office’s Inclusive Excellence Program, is a unique opportunity for students from Hampton University, a historically black university (HBCU), to spend the summer doing research and learning cutting-edge genomic techniques at the IGI. Learn more.
The Center for CRISPR Target Discovery is a state-of-the-art functional genomics laboratory created by IGI and the life sciences venture capital firm Apple Tree Partners (ATP) to use the power of CRISPR-based technologies to accelerate the exploration and validation of new biological targets that can be translated into novel therapeutics to answer unmet needs.
Through the CCTD, scientists receive funding and access to IGI laboratory facilities to advance projects of 1–2 years’ duration aimed at accelerating the treatment and prevention of human disease through interrogation and validation of novel drug targets. Learn more and meet our grant recipients.
Previous Programs
The Tory Burch Foundation Fellowship at the IGI supported Fellows to participate in Tory Burch Foundation programs, while receiving up to salary and benefits, mentoring and entrepreneurial training, as well as space at the IGI to develop their ideas. This fellowship was aimed at increasing gender equity in bio-entrepreneurship. Learn more.
To accelerate research efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the IGI awarded over $2 million in funding to new COVID-19 research projects through our Rapid Response Research (RRR) fund and the Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR) Excellence in Research Award (ERA). Because of the urgency of the public health crisis, this funding was awarded to projects expected to yield results in just 6–12 months.
These research projects spanned a variety of approaches aimed at quickly gaining a better understanding of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic to track its spread. Learn more.
The IGI, together with Stochastic Labs, created the CRISPR (un)commons residency program, which invited artists to explore CRISPR applications and envision new ways of engaging with the future of genome editing. .
In the CRISPR (un)commons program, a small group of artists lived in community together at the Stochastic Labs house in North Berkeley for two months. During this time, they wereinvited into the IGI to engage directly with our researchers and CRISPR technology. Ultimately, they produce creative works that reflected on this innovative system. Learn more.
The Shurl & Kay Curci Foundation (SKCF) Faculty Scholars program was a program to support early-career faculty at whose research aligned with the IGI’s goal to advance human health using precision genomics. The SKCF Faculty Scholars Program launched in 2017 thanks to a $1 million gift from the Shurl & Kay Curci Foundation. Learn more.
The Entrepreneurial Fellows Program helped entrepreneurial-minded, early-career researchers at IGI commercialize innovative research for practical benefit. Learn more.