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Active Institutional Grants

Here is a list of active external grants that have been awarded to Williams College in support of institutional priorities and/or programmatic activities. Awards are listed alphabetically by funding organization.

Most Recently Awarded Grants:

American Chemical Society

Williams College has been awarded a $25,000 ACS PRF supplemental grant that will provide more support for Assistant Professor of Chemistry Ben Augenbraun‘s two-year investigation of the bonding between gold and carbon atoms. Specifically, this grant will support the purchase of a multi-channel fiber switcher and the associated optomechanics and optical fibers that will be used for the construction of a centralized wavelength measurement and stabilization system. This will be integrated with a wavemeter that is already on hand at the college. It will extend the capabilities by allowing multiple users to access the wavemeter at the same time, creating a centralized node for wavelength monitoring and stabilization that can be shared by multiple researchers at the same time. For high-resolution spectroscopy experiments, wavelength calibration and stabilization is critical because knowing the central frequencies of absorption/fluorescence features that are separated by distances as small as ~5 MHz is the key experimental observable.  (August 2024)

Davis United World College Scholars Program (DUWCSP)

A one-year $110,000 DUWCSP grant has been awarded to Williams College to support financial aid for international students, who graduated from a United World College.  (November 2024)

Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has awarded a two-year $50,000 grant to the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). This grant will partially fund the implementation of direct digital controls in WCMA’s new museum building’s HVAC control system, optimizing the HVAC system’s energy efficiency. More information on this exciting project can be found here.  (July 2024)

Getty Foundation

The Getty Foundation awarded a $100,000 grant to the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) to support the Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art exhibition. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College.  (April 2022)

Per Jacobsson Foundation

Williams has received a three-year $75,000 grant from the Per Jacobsson Foundation that will support the CDE/Per Jacobsson Speaker Series. Through this speaker series, the Center for Development Economics (CDE) will invite three senior CDE alumni each year to spend several days in Williamstown with current CDE Fellows, providing the Fellows an opportunity to tap the experience, values, and enthusiasm of leading practitioners from different countries.  (April 2023)

Massachusetts Life Sciences Center MLSC)

Williams has received a two-year $744,886 Work Development Capital Grant from MLSC. Led by Assistant Professor of Psychology Victor Cazares and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Katie Keith, the project supported by this grant provides a wonderful mechanism to integrate data science into the Division 3 curriculum while also supporting the research programs of several Williams faculty. The grant funds will bring state-of-the-art brain imaging equipment and GPU computer servers to the college, making Williams one of a few liberal arts colleges in the country to have these cutting-edge tools available for teaching and research. This project will give Williams faculty and students new opportunities to tackle real-world big-data challenges, and students will be better prepared for careers in the life science industries.  (June 2024)

Mellon Foundation

  • Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUFP): Williams has received $162,000 from the Mellon Foundation to support its 2024-2025 MMUF Program. The MMUF is a fellowship that works to increase the number of students from historically underrepresented groups who pursue graduate school and academic careers. (August 2024)
  • Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty, and Freedom: As part of a collaborative team, Williams received $573,350 for its part in the Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty, and Freedom (“Just Futures”) project. This public humanities project, co-led by faculty and co-PIs at Williams, Williams-Mystic Coastal and Ocean Studies Program, Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and Mystic Seaport Museum, developed constructs to support critical thinking and ethical commitments for students, communities, scholars, and teachers seeking to understand and engage with the historical and contemporary issues of Indigenous, African-American, and Afro-Indigenous communities within and beyond the Northeast.   (December 2020)

National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)

Williams has received two two-year grants from the NCAA, a Division III Ethnic Minorities and Women’s Internship Grant and a Division III Coaching Enhancement Grant. The internship grant will support the salary of an individual in the position of athletic assistant for special projects. The coaching enhancement grant will support the salary of an individual in the position of assistant squash coach.  (April 2023)

National Science Foundation (NSF)

Williams has been awarded a two-year $98,706 NSF grant that will support a project to develop, pilot, assess, and share a readily available and affordable external review service model for use at predominately undergraduate institutions (PUIs) as they seek to create and/or strengthen their campus grants culture and develop research administration infrastructure. Guided by the extensive professional experiences and expertise of research administrators who are members of the Colleges of the Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs (CLASP) network, the PI (Brenda Thomas, Williams’ grants office director) and working group will formalize and share best practices around the broader operations within grants offices at PUIs.  (June 2024)

Projects for Peace

Two Williams students have each been awarded a $10,000 grant to support their summer peace projects. One project will provide computers to a secondary school in Kenya,  reducing inequality in computer access, expanding opportunities, and broadening the world perspectives of students who previously had no access to computers and the Internet. The second project will support the creation of a secure and dust-free environment for a computer classroom and install 25 computers in a high school for gifted students in Tigray, Ethiopia. This second grant will also support computer training for teachers and the establishment of a wireless internet network in the computer classroom.  (April 2024)