The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes grants primarily to support original research and education related to science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. The Foundation believes that these fields—and the scholars and practitioners who work in them—are chief drivers of the nation’s health and prosperity. The Foundation also believes that a reasoned, systematic understanding of the forces of nature and society, when applied inventively and wisely, can lead to a better world for all.
This RFP is for a postdoctoral fellowship program for grants of up to $250,000 USD to support early career researchers in the social sciences and humanities (with particular emphasis on philosophy, sociology of science, and metascience) who are interested in building a career in understanding the implications of AI for the science and research ecosystem.
AI (currently understood as a set of technologies including machine learning, deep learning, and foundation models) could accelerate scientific discovery, whether through narrow applications like DeepMind’s AlphaFold, or general applications such as advances in AI-enabled lab robotics, evidence synthesis, or statistical inference. There are many practical and technical challenges to solve before society has fully-fledged autonomous ‘AI scientists’. Nevertheless, it seems inevitable that over the coming years public and private R&D funders will make significant investments both to diffuse and adopt AI technologies, and to solve technical challenges, in the direction of a more heavily AI-mediated research.
This program will support a cohort of postdoctoral researchers to deepen their understanding of AI technology and pursue career paths which evaluate the phenomenon of AI-mediated science and guide its pursuit, covering one or more of the following objectives:
building our understanding of how the growing adoption of AI is changing the research landscape and the day-to-day work of researchers;
building our understanding of the epistemic, metascientific, ethical and/or socioeconomic implications of these changes; and
building understanding of how governments, industry, and/or funding organizations should respond to improve our research landscape.
This program will not fund fellows whose primary research focus is the direct development of scientific AI tools. The funding opportunity is open to early career researchers who will have completed their PhD by the start date of the fellowship or who can demonstrate equivalent research or innovation experience, and who do not yet hold a permanent or tenure-track academic position.
This fellowship program is intended for researchers who are uniquely interested in AI’s impact on science, rather than general AI ethics, safety and society-related topics (as these are covered substantially elsewhere).