The Pew Charitable Trusts is a major U.S. funder of biomedical research and a producer of policy research in its own right, but it does not fit the standard private-foundation template that research administrators use for most other major philanthropies. Pew is legally a public charity, not a private foundation; it runs one of the most selective early-career biomedical funding programs in the country by nomination only; and a substantial share of its “research” output is generated in-house by its own staff rather than funded out to external investigators. Understanding those distinctions matters before treating Pew as a prospect the way a sponsored-programs office would treat a conventional grantmaking foundation.
What The Pew Charitable Trusts Is
The Pew Charitable Trusts was established in 1948 by children of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph N. Pew, initially as a group of separate family charitable trusts. It is headquartered in Philadelphia, with a substantial policy-facing presence in Washington, D.C. In the early 2000s, the organization consolidated its original set of family trusts into a single 501(c)(3) public charity — a structural detail that matters more than it might first appear. Unlike a private foundation, which is typically funded and controlled by a single family or small group of donors and is subject to the private-foundation excise-tax and payout rules under the Internal Revenue Code, a public charity draws support more broadly and has more latitude to conduct its own direct research, advocacy, and public-education work rather than functioning purely as a grantmaking intermediary.
That distinction is the key to understanding Pew’s “hybrid” identity. It is simultaneously: an operating charity that conducts and publishes its own policy research using in-house staff; a grantmaker that funds external investigators and partner organizations on a defined set of programs; and, through its subsidiary Pew Research Center, a source of nonpartisan public-opinion and demographic research. Very little of this work resembles the open, unsolicited-letter-of-inquiry model that a research administrator might use with a mid-sized regional foundation grant program.
The Pew Biomedical Scholars Program
The best-known research-funding vehicle at Pew, for a research administration audience, is the Pew Biomedical Scholars Program, which supports outstanding early-career scientists in the biomedical sciences. Its structure is distinctive in several ways that matter operationally:
- Nomination-only, not open application. Pew does not accept unsolicited applications for this program. A defined, periodically reviewed list of U.S. academic and research institutions is invited to nominate candidates, and each eligible institution or department is typically limited to a small number of nominations per competition cycle — usually one per department. A candidate cannot self-apply; the nomination has to come through the institution’s own internal selection process.
- Narrow career-stage eligibility. Eligible nominees hold a doctorate in a biomedical or related physical/life science field and have recently begun their first independent faculty appointment, typically at the assistant-professor level, within a defined recent window (on the order of the preceding three years, with allowances such as clinical training or parental leave not counting against that window). This places the program squarely alongside NIH’s early-career mechanisms as a funding option research administrators should flag for newly hired tenure-track investigators, distinct from program-officer-mediated federal K-series awards.
- Award size. Institutional research-office guidance describing the program (rather than Pew’s own guidelines page directly, which returned an access error at verification time) reports an award of roughly $75,000 per year for four years, for a total of approximately $300,000, with restrictions on how much of that can go to the principal investigator’s own salary versus students, postdocs, and supplies. Because award terms are revised periodically, institutions and PIs should confirm the current figure directly with Pew or their own sponsored-programs office rather than relying on any single year’s figure.
- Unrestricted, flexible funding. Once awarded, Pew Biomedical Scholars funding is characterized as largely unrestricted within the biomedical research the scholar is pursuing — closer in spirit to the flexible support many private foundations increasingly favor than to a narrowly scoped federal project grant.
Pew runs at least two closely related, similarly structured programs that research administrators in relevant fields should know about: the Pew-Stewart Scholars for Cancer Research, a partnership with the Alexander and Margaret Stewart Trust that extends the same nomination-based, early-career model specifically to cancer research, and the Pew Latin American Fellows Program, which funds postdoctoral researchers from Latin America to train in biomedical labs in the United States or Canada. Both follow the same basic logic as the Biomedical Scholars program — institutional nomination or a defined application channel, career-stage eligibility, and a multi-year award — rather than an open competitive proposal process.
Policy Research: How Pew’s In-House Work Differs From Grantmaking
Outside biomedicine, most of what Pew is known for — state fiscal policy, public safety and health system research, ocean and land conservation policy, and government-performance work — is produced substantially in-house. Pew employs its own researchers, publishes its own reports and data tools (for example, its long-running “Fiscal 50” state-budget tracker), and directly engages state and federal policymakers with those findings. This is the “operating charity” half of Pew’s identity: rather than funding a university center to study a state’s pension liabilities and then republishing that center’s findings, Pew more often runs that research with its own staff and issues the findings under its own name.
That does not mean Pew never funds outside researchers or institutions on policy topics. It does fund targeted research and policy-development initiatives in partnership with universities, other philanthropies, research organizations, and government entities — a February 2025 joint report with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) on sustaining “public impact” research at universities is one recent example of this collaborative mode. But this project-based, invitation-driven collaboration on specific policy questions is a different funding relationship than the standing, broadly advertised programs research offices track for federal agencies or for grantmaking foundations such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation. There is no standing, open request-for-proposals process comparable to a federal funding opportunity announcement for most of Pew’s policy work; institutions typically become involved because Pew’s staff identifies a specific partner for a specific project.
Pew Research Center: A Related but Legally Separate Organization
Research administrators and faculty frequently conflate The Pew Charitable Trusts with the Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan polling and demographic-research organization widely cited in the social sciences and journalism. The two are related but distinct: Pew established the Research Center as a nonprofit subsidiary in 2004, consolidating several Trusts-supported information projects under one roof with its own governing board overseeing day-to-day operations, budget, and editorial independence. Most of the Research Center’s funding still comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts, but the Center operates independently of its funder in choosing what to study and how to report it, and it does not itself make research grants to outside investigators — it conducts and publishes its own survey and demographic research. A researcher citing Pew Research Center survey data and an institution being nominated for a Pew Biomedical Scholars award are interacting with two organizationally distinct, if affiliated, entities.
How Institutions and Researchers Typically Engage With Pew
For a sponsored-programs office or research development staff, the practical takeaways are:
- Biomedical Scholars and its sister programs run on institutional nomination, not individual application. Research offices supporting biomedical faculty should confirm whether their institution is on Pew’s current eligible-nominator list, track the internal nomination deadline (which is set by the institution and falls well before Pew’s own deadline), and manage the department-level nomination-slot allocation the same way they would for other quota-limited award programs.
- Policy-research partnerships are relationship- and project-driven. There is generally no open call to respond to; involvement tends to follow from an existing relationship between Pew program staff and a specific research group, center, or association.
- Don’t assume Pew Research Center accepts proposals. Faculty asking “how do we get a grant from Pew Research Center” are usually thinking of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ funded programs; the Research Center itself is a research producer, not a grantmaking body.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Pew Charitable Trusts a private foundation?
No. It is legally organized as a public charity, not a private foundation, which is part of why it can combine direct in-house policy research and advocacy with traditional grantmaking in a way that is less typical of family-endowed private foundations.
Can an individual investigator apply directly for a Pew Biomedical Scholars award?
No. The program is nomination-based: only institutions on Pew’s current list of eligible nominating organizations may put candidates forward, generally with a strict limit on the number of nominees per institution or department per cycle.
Is Pew Research Center the same organization as The Pew Charitable Trusts?
They are affiliated but organizationally distinct. Pew Research Center is a nonprofit subsidiary that Pew established in 2004; it has its own governing board and editorial independence, is funded substantially by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and does not itself fund outside researchers.
Does The Pew Charitable Trusts fund unsolicited research proposals?
Rarely. Its highest-profile biomedical program is nomination-only, and most of its policy research is either produced in-house or pursued through targeted partnerships that Pew staff initiate, rather than through a standing open call comparable to a federal funding opportunity announcement.
What fields does the Pew Biomedical Scholars program cover?
It is open to early-career independent investigators across the physical and life sciences relevant to human health and biomedical research, not a single narrow subfield, though the nomination and review process is centered on basic and translational biomedical science.
