[pfannkuchen]

I’m not aware of anything stopping it except for perhaps how the system is set up.

Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).

[porcoda]

That does happen: foundations will fund specific research and universities apply and get it. What is often different is that foundations rarely put out open calls outside the areas the foundation is specifically interested in. That is where government funding tends to be better: covers many more areas than foundations tend to be interested in. There’s nothing stopping foundations from doing that, but I haven’t seen it very often other than a couple calls here and there. I’ve been a researcher chasing money for decades: I’d love it if foundations would fill this role, but alas, they don’t so far. Plus, the scale doesn’t match: if you added up all the private funding that is available, it’s tiny compared to the federal science budgets.

[jghn]

> That does happen: foundations will fund specific research and universities apply and get it

For instance, the Chan Zuckerberg Institute before Zuck decided he had to appear to hate science in order to curry favor with the current regime.

[ekr____]

More or less. Corporations fund research all the time. Just to pick a random example, check out the acknowledgements on this paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/132

"This work was funded in part by NSF Award CNS-2054869 and gifts from Apple, Capital One, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla."

That said, private grant funding is just of a completely different scale than government grant funding. For example, NIH's annual budget is 48 billion and most of that goes to research (https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget).

[warkdarrior]

Give Harvard's Office for Sponsored Programs a call and tell them you are ready to award $1M. It really helps if you already have a lab or PI in mind.

   Office for Sponsored Programs
   1033 Massachusetts Avenue
   5th Floor
   Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
   617-495-5501
   [e-mail]

[ckemere]

If there’s a specific researcher you want to fund, you can absolutely call them up. There will be paperwork around IP, independence, etc.

If you want them to do a specific experiment you’ll likely first need to convince them that it’s a good use of their time.

Harvard itself plays approximately zero role in the decision to do a study or not. (There are ethical oversight committees, etc.)

$1M total cost ($600-800k direct cost depending on terms) will buy you a postdoc’s time and effort for 5 years. Unfortunately most labs aren’t set up for a time/money tradeoff, so 5 postdocs for 1 year would be unlikely absent a really exciting project.

It definitely happens quite a bit!