Interested in learning about postdoc funding? Join a variety of workshops aimed to help identify funding opportunities. We will have workshops focused on federal and non-federal funding.

Schedule of Events

• Finding Postdoc Funding – May 2026
• Applying for the K99/R00 Early Career Award – May 12, 2026
• Basics of Mentored Grant Writing – May 19, 2026
• Fellowship Recipient Panel – June 2, 2026
• Non-Federal Sources Funding Opportunities Fair – June 9, 2026

Finding Postdoc Funding

Date: May 2026 | Time: TBD
Location: Online
Speaker: Cory Davis, PhD

This 90-minute workshop will guide postdoctoral researchers through available resources to help them efficiently find funding opportunities appropriate for their research and career stage. We will utilize funding opportunity databases to create individualized proposal submission plans that postdocs can reference throughout their research career. Tips will be shared to automate future funding searches and best utilize existing resources. For the final 30 minutes of the workshop, participants will break out into institute-specific rooms to learn more about the resources and processes at their current institution.

Speaker Bio: Cory Davis, PhD serves as the Management Services Officer in UC San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation and has extensive experience in grant management and administration. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy from The University of Texas at Austin, and her Master’s in International Studies from the University of San Francisco, and is a proud alumna of UC San Diego’s Sixth College.

Applying for the K99/R00 Early Career Award

Date: May 12, 2026 | Time: Time: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm PT / 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm ET
Location: Online
Speaker: Jaime S. Rubin, PhD

This workshop will include details about the application process for the K99/R00 award. This award will provide up to five years of support consisting of two phases. The initial phase will provide 1-2 years of mentored support for highly promising, postdoctoral scholars. This phase will be followed by up to 3 years of independent support contingent on securing an independent research position. Importantly, US AND non-US citizens are eligible to apply for this award.

Speaker Bio: Jaime S. Rubin, PhD is the Vice Chair for Investigator Development and Professor in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University. She received a B.S. in physics sigma pi sigma from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (New York, N.Y.) and then her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto (Canada). Her Ph.D. thesis, published in the journal, Nature, described the first molecular identification and characterization of a human DNA repair gene. She has held a number of senior level positions at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which have allowed for the teaching, mentoring, and career development of junior investigators, especially postdoctoral scientists and fellows. She founded and serves as Director of the graduate-level course, “Funding and Grantsmanship for Research and Career Development Activities” (http://grantscourse.columbia.edu) and is a member of the Executive and Education and Career Development Committees of several NIH-funded postdoctoral research training grants. She is committed to effective mentorship, having completed the “Train-the-Trainers Workshop: Facilitating Entering Mentoring” program offered by the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER). In 2023, she was honored to serve as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar with the Republic of Kosovo’s Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, working on projects related to faculty and research development.

Basics of Mentored Grant Writing

Date: May 19, 2026 | Time: Time: 1:00 – 3:00 pm PT / 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm ET
Location: Online
Speaker: Michael J. Williams, PhD

Come and learn the fundamentals of Grant Writing, a necessary skill in academia, and many other career paths. Dr. Michael Williams, Research Development Officer at Scripps Research, will share his vast experience of how to create a well–structured grant and the general review process the grant will receive.

Speaker Bio: Michael J. Williams, PhD, is the Research Development Officer at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, where he spearheads strategic initiatives to enhance research funding and institutional growth. A highly accomplished scientific leader with over 25 years of experience, Dr. Williams specializes in translating complex scientific concepts into successful grant proposals and strategic plans. Prior to his current role, he held a distinguished tenure at Uppsala University in Sweden as a Professor of Functional Pharmacology, Department of Neuroscience, where he led research programs focused on metabolism, neurobiology, and environmental toxicology. Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from the University of Notre Dame. His extensive research career has focused on the molecular mechanisms of disease, with foundational work in cellular immunity and neuroendocrinology. Throughout his career, he has successfully secured and managed a diverse portfolio of research grants from international funding bodies, including the Swedish Research Council, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, FORMAS and the EU. Beyond his research and administrative leadership, Dr. Williams is a dedicated mentor and a key figure in the global scientific community. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Small GTPases (Taylor & Francis) and has served in leadership capacities for major international conferences, including as President of the 1st European Small GTPase Conference. His professional background spans multiple countries and prestigious institutions, including the University of Aberdeen (UK) and Umeå University (Sweden), providing him with a unique, global perspective on research infrastructure and international collaboration. At The Scripps Research Institute, he continues to mentor both junior and senior faculty, fostering the development of the next generation of scientific investigators.

Fellowship Recipient Panel

Date: June 2, 2026 | Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am PT / 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET
Location: Online
Panelists:

• Krissy Lyon, PhD
• Tejapratap (Teja) Bollu, PhD
• Jingwen Li, PhD
• Donté Alexander Stevens, PhD

Join us to hear from fellowship recipients as they discuss their experience applying for and receiving their awards and share their tips for navigating the process. Panelists will discuss how they found and applied for their fellowships and their experience writing and submitting their applications. Don’t miss your chance to get your questions answered and learn how you can best prepare for, and submit a strong fellowship application! Current K99/R00, HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program, Simons Foundation Fellows-to-Faculty Award and Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholar Award recipients will be featured.

Panelist Bios:
Krissy Lyon, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow and NIH K99 awardee at the Salk Institute in San Diego, CA. Her research focuses on astrocyte-neuron interactions in neurodevelopment and associated disorders with Dr. Nicola Allen. She is a Burroughs Wellcome Fund PDEP and Leading Edge Fellow. She received her PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard University studying the role of dopamine-receptor expressing serotonergic neurons in the modulation of behavior in the lab of Dr. Susan Dymecki. She is originally from Arizona and received her BA from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.

Tejapratap (Teja) Bollu, PhD is a Neurobiologist and Engineer with a primary research interest in understanding how the nervous system senses information from the world and within the body, processes it and acts on this information. He studies these questions in the spinal cord, an evolutionarily conserved and molecularly well-defined structure that is one synapse away from the world.
Teja is a postdoctoral fellow in Martyn Goulding’s lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. His work is supported by fellowships from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation and the Joe W. and Dorothy Dorsett Brown Foundation. He has been recently awarded the Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholar Award in Neuroscience to support his transition to independence. Teja earned his PhD in Neurobiology and an M.Eng in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca where he identified the motor cortical circuits controlling limb and tongue dexterity.

Jingwen Li, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego. Her research centers on uncovering the neural mechanisms of active vision and social interaction in freely moving marmosets with naturalistic settings. Her work revealed a distributed functional organization spanning sensory, motor, and cognitive domains for representations of vocal interactions in the frontal cortex of freely behaving marmosets. In parallel, she investigated visual representations in freely moving marmosets using an innovative head-mounted eye-tracking system, demonstrating that primate V1 is structured by the temporal dynamics of natural gaze behavior and is tightly driven by the resulting visual input.
She previously received her PhD in physics with a neuroscience concentration from the University of Arkansas. Her doctoral research focused on population dynamics shaped by the excitation and inhibition (E/I) balance during natural exploration in freely moving animals, and their alternations in Rett syndrome (RTT). Using network modeling and large-scale single-unit recordings in freely moving rats, her work revealed how proper E/I tuning supports flexible cortical states and identified neural mechanisms linking E/I imbalance to the behavioral impairments observed in RTT.
Jingwen Li received the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind Postdoctoral Award in 2023. More recently, she received the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) Fellows-to-Faculty Award in 2025.

Donté Alexander (Alex) Stevens, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Research. He received a B.A. in Biology and Spanish Literature at Washington & Jefferson College (Washington, PA). He then went on to earn his Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from UC San Diego, where he explored how conflicts between hosts and viruses have shaped the intracellular transport machinery. As a graduate student Alex was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Gilliam Fellowship. Currently, his postdoctoral research focuses on engineering biomolecular condensates as tools for studying cellular processes. As a postdoctoral fellow Alex has been recognized by the Life Science Research Foundation, the National Science Foundation (PRFB), the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund, the HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Postdoctoral Diversity Enrichment Program.

Non-Federal Sources Funding Opportunities Fair

Date: June 9, 2026 | Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm PT / 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm ET
Location: Online

Non-federal funding agencies will share what fellowship opportunities are available to postdocs and what they are looking for from applicants and their research proposals. A Zoom link will be provided after registering.

Participating funding agencies include:

• Additional Ventures
• American Society of Nephrology
• ALS Association
• Breakthrough TD1
• Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP)
• Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research
• Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
• National Bleeding Disorders Foundation
• Larry L. Hillblom Foundation
• Pew Charitable Trust