March of Dimes Discovery Research Grants 2027: $200,000 Over Two Years for Established Scientists Working on Spontaneous Preterm Birth and Cardiovascular Conditions in Pregnancy — Portal Closes 8 September 2026

March of Dimes Discovery Research Grants 2027: $200,000 Over Two Years for Established Scientists Working on Spontaneous Preterm Birth and Cardiovascular Conditions in Pregnancy — Portal Closes 8 September 2026

Most funders that care about pregnancy fund it obliquely — as a subpopulation inside a larger cardiology trial, as a covariate in a health services study, as a footnote in an obstetrics portfolio. March of Dimes does the opposite. Its Discovery Research Grants are the organisation’s highest tier of research funding, and they are written around two extremely specific problems: why babies are born too early without anyone inducing labour, and what happens to a pregnant person’s heart and vasculature when pregnancy either causes or unmasks cardiovascular disease. If your work sits squarely inside one of those two questions, this is one of the few awards where you will not have to spend the first page of your application explaining why pregnancy matters.

The award is $200,000 over two years, inclusive of 10% indirect costs. The application portal opened on 8 June 2026 and closes on 8 September 2026. Award notifications go out in mid-January 2027, and the funded period runs 1 February 2027 to 31 January 2029. Applications are accepted globally — this is not restricted to U.S. citizens or U.S. institutions — and the entire process runs through an online portal hosted at modresearchgrants.aibs-scores.org.

This guide covers what the grant actually buys, who March of Dimes means by “established scientist,” how the two priority topics are scoped, what the required application sections are, and where applicants most often go wrong.

Key Details at a Glance

What the Grant Is For

March of Dimes describes Discovery Grants as being “for established scientists with a history of published work in the maternal and infant health and related fields,” and calls them “the highest tier of grants available through March of Dimes.” The framing in the official call is unusually direct about what it wants: research inquiries that are “as practical as they are ambitious, as attainable as they are groundbreaking, and as transformative as they are necessary.”

Read past the rhetoric and there is a real selection signal in it. The programme is explicitly translational. It funds “seasoned researchers seeking to make consequential translational discoveries that will drastically alter clinical care for pregnant people and babies, whether through evidence-based prevention, diagnosis, or intervention.” The word doing the heaviest lifting is clinical care. A proposal that ends at a mechanism, a biomarker association, or a descriptive epidemiological finding — with no articulated path to changing what a clinician does — is fighting the brief.

The hard constraint stated on the page applies to both topics: “All studies must have the potential to improve clinical care and decrease the rate of maternal and infant morbidity and mortality.” That is the sentence to hold your specific aims up against before you write anything else.

The Two Priority Topics, Read Closely

Priority topic 1 — Spontaneous preterm birth. This topic covers “prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disorders leading to spontaneous preterm birth.” The operative word is spontaneous: this is about preterm birth that happens, not preterm birth that is clinically indicated and delivered. Proposals here are expected to have “the potential to improve clinical care to prevent adverse maternal and child outcomes.” That framing invites work on the upstream disorders — infection and inflammation, cervical insufficiency, membrane biology, the myometrial transition to labour — provided the study connects to a prevention, diagnostic, or treatment decision a clinician could eventually make.

Priority topic 2 — Cardiovascular health conditions developed or exacerbated during pregnancy. Proposals here “should focus on cardiovascular conditions that begin, develop, or worsen during pregnancy and identify tangible ways to characterize, prevent, and/or mitigate their development.” Note the third verb in that list — characterize — which leaves room for well-designed phenotyping and natural-history work that many purely interventional calls would exclude. Note also that “exacerbated during pregnancy” covers pre-existing cardiovascular disease that pregnancy destabilises, not only conditions that first appear in pregnancy. Peripartum cardiomyopathy, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and their cardiovascular sequelae, and pregnancy as a cardiovascular stress test all sit naturally inside this scope.

Both topics share the same time window: investigations may look at “the periods of pregnancy, intrapartum, and up to one year postpartum.” The full postpartum year is in scope, which matters — a substantial share of pregnancy-associated cardiovascular morbidity and mortality occurs after discharge, and the call does not force you to stop at six weeks.

What Kind of Study Design Will Fly

The call is specific about study material, and this is where a lot of otherwise strong labs will find themselves out of scope.

Eligible research “may include human studies or studies with human tissue or studies at the population level.” Then the important qualifier: “Models systems research is discouraged, but is eligible if used to validate novel human disease processes.” A mouse model, an organoid, or a cell system is not disqualifying, but it cannot be the centre of gravity. It has to be doing validation work in service of a human disease process you have already identified. If your proposal is fundamentally an animal study with a paragraph about eventual human relevance, expect that to be read as a mismatch rather than a stretch.

Two additional openings are worth noticing, because they widen the applicant pool beyond wet-lab investigators:

• “Research proposals may involve information and communications technology innovations.” Digital diagnostics, remote monitoring, decision support, and data-driven risk stratification are explicitly in bounds.
• “We encourage multidisciplinary collaborations, including those with community-based partners.” Community partnership is invited, not merely tolerated — consistent with March of Dimes’ stated mission of “closing the health equity gap for all families.”

Together these signal that a population-level or implementation-flavoured proposal with a genuine clinical endpoint can compete against a bench proposal here. The programme is not exclusively a laboratory award.

Who Is Eligible

March of Dimes invites submissions from:

• Health professionals, health researchers, epidemiologists, and social scientists with doctoral academic degrees and either a faculty appointment or equivalent at academic universities, hospitals, and research institutions;
• Employees of small businesses, startup companies, or nonprofit organizations; or
• Employees of pharmaceutical companies committed to research in the area of maternal and infant health.

Three additional rules govern who may apply:

1. Applications are not limited to U.S. citizens. The award is open to global applicants — an unusually open posture for a U.S. health nonprofit, and one worth taking seriously if you are based outside North America.
2. Applicants may not hold any other current March of Dimes grant when applying. If you are mid-term on a March of Dimes award of any kind, you are out for this cycle.
3. One application per person, listing yourself as either Primary Investigator or Co-Primary Investigator. You cannot hedge by appearing as PI on one submission and co-PI on another.

The disciplinary list — epidemiologists and social scientists named alongside health researchers — is not decorative. It reflects a funder that treats maternal and infant health as a problem with structural and behavioural components, not only biological ones.

One caveat about the “established scientists with a history of published work” language: the official page does not publish a numeric threshold for years post-degree, publication count, or prior independent funding. There is no stated career-stage cutoff. What it does state is the expectation of a track record in maternal and infant health “and related fields.” If you are early in your independent career but have a genuine publication record in this space, nothing in the written eligibility criteria excludes you — but you should expect to be read alongside senior investigators and should build your biosketch and preliminary data accordingly.

What the Application Requires

The entire process is completed online at https://modresearchgrants.aibs-scores.org. The required components are:

• Title and abstract of the proposed project
• Statement of objective and hypothesis
• Preliminary data and background studies
• Research approach and intended deliverables
• Budget and budget justification
• Candidate’s biographical sketch
• Facilities available
• Current and pending financial support — each grant or contract supporting the conduct of this research must be listed; if there is none, you must explicitly state “NONE”

That last instruction is small and easy to skip, and it is the kind of thing that generates an administrative query at exactly the wrong moment. Write “NONE” rather than leaving the field blank.

Two components deserve more attention than applicants usually give them:

“Preliminary data and background studies” is a required section, not an optional strengthener. For a programme aimed at established investigators making translational claims, this section is where the credibility of the whole proposal is decided. If your preliminary data are thin, the honest move is to scope the aims down to what your existing data actually support rather than to project confidence you cannot evidence.

“Research approach and intended deliverables” asks for deliverables by name. Many applicants write an approach section and let the deliverables remain implicit. Don’t. State what will exist at the end of 24 months — a validated assay, a characterised cohort, an analysed trial dataset, a fielded tool — in terms concrete enough that a reviewer can check them off.

Budgeting Within $200,000

The budget line is stated tightly: "$200,000 over two years inclusive of 10% indirect costs." Read that as a ceiling on the total, not a direct-cost figure. If your institution’s negotiated indirect rate is 50-something percent, someone in your research office needs to know early that this funder caps recovery at 10% and that the 10% comes out of the $200,000 rather than sitting on top of it. That leaves roughly $180,000 of direct costs across two years — about $90,000 a year.

Plan the science to that number honestly. Ninety thousand dollars a year does not buy a large prospective trial from scratch. It does buy: a well-powered secondary analysis of an existing cohort, a focused biomarker validation in banked human tissue, a substantial part of a postdoc or research coordinator’s effort, a defined arm of a larger study, or the human-validation component of work you are already running. Reviewers of a $200,000 award are not looking for a proposal that would need $2 million to complete; they are looking for a proposal whose stated deliverables are achievable with what is on offer.

Timeline for the 2027 Cycle

The four-month gap between the September close and the mid-January notification is the review period. Plan on no news during it. The February 2027 start date is firm enough that you should confirm institutional readiness — subaward paperwork, IRB or ethics approval timelines, any material transfer agreements — well before you hear back, so that a January award does not stall on paperwork through spring.

March of Dimes states that requests for exceptions on timing, giving parental leave as the example, may be submitted to the research contact email address published on the official grants page. If a career interruption affects how your record reads, ask about it in advance rather than explaining it in the application and hoping.

What Awardees Are Expected to Do Beyond the Science

March of Dimes publishes an explicit set of “awardee partnership expectations,” and it is worth reading before you apply, because it describes obligations that are not purely scientific. The organisation expects awardees to:

• Attend key meetings pertaining to their award programme, or send an appropriate delegate;
• Collaborate scientifically and collegially with other centres or nonprofit organisations identified during the award period;
• Attend scientific meetings that March of Dimes may establish;
• Use good faith efforts to help March of Dimes raise funds for future awards, “through attendance at some events, interviews, or other public-facing opportunities”;
• Notify March of Dimes of publications, posters, and presentations so the organisation can amplify the work publicly.

That fundraising and public-engagement clause is unusual among research funders and is stated plainly rather than buried. It is not onerous — it is a good-faith obligation, not a quota — but if you are institutionally or personally unwilling to do donor-facing communication, you should know that going in.

Common Mistakes

Treating “translational” as a rhetorical flourish. The single most common failure mode for this call is a mechanistically excellent proposal with no stated route to clinical care. The call says twice, in different words, that studies must have the potential to improve clinical care and decrease maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. Make that route explicit and specific.

Leading with a model system. Model systems research is described as discouraged. It survives only when validating novel human disease processes. Restructure so that human data or human tissue is the spine and the model is the support.

Drifting outside the two topics. The priority areas are narrow by design. Neonatal outcomes untethered from spontaneous preterm birth, general reproductive biology, and infertility research are not what this cycle is asking for. If your work is adjacent rather than inside, look at other March of Dimes funding vehicles rather than forcing the fit.

Ignoring the indirect cost cap until late. Discovering at the submission stage that your institution will not accept a 10%-inclusive cap is a preventable disaster. Raise it with your grants office in the first week.

Applying while holding another March of Dimes grant. This is a hard bar, not a preference.

Submitting more than one application. One per person, as PI or co-PI. A second submission is an eligibility problem, not a second chance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I apply from outside the United States? Yes. The official page states that applications are not limited to U.S. citizens and that the award is open to global applicants.

Is there a letter of intent stage? The published cycle dates list only a portal open date and a portal close date, with no separate letter of intent deadline. Plan for a single full submission by 8 September 2026.

How much of the $200,000 can go to indirect costs? Up to 10%, and it is included within the $200,000 rather than added to it.

Can a non-clinician apply? Yes. The eligible groups include health researchers, epidemiologists, and social scientists with doctoral academic degrees, alongside health professionals.

Can I apply from a company? Yes, if you are an employee of a small business, startup, or nonprofit organisation, or of a pharmaceutical company committed to maternal and infant health research.

Does postpartum research count? Yes — investigations may cover pregnancy, intrapartum, and up to one year postpartum.

Can I be a co-PI on one application and PI on another? No. Applicants may submit only one application, listing themselves as either Primary Investigator or Co-Primary Investigator.

What if a parental leave or similar interruption affects my eligibility timing? March of Dimes states that requests for exceptions on timing may be submitted to the research contact address given on the official grants page. Ask before the deadline.

How to Prepare Before 8 September 2026

If you are eligible and inside one of the two topics, the work between now and the deadline breaks into four tracks that can run in parallel.

Confirm the fit in writing. Draft a single paragraph that names your priority topic, states the clinical decision your findings would change, and names the deliverable at 24 months. If that paragraph is hard to write, the proposal is not ready.

Clear the budget question institutionally. Get written confirmation that your institution will accept an award with 10% indirect costs included in the total. Do this first, because it can kill a submission independently of scientific merit.

Assemble the human data. Preliminary data and background studies is a required section. Identify now which human cohort, tissue bank, registry, or dataset anchors the proposal, and confirm you have — or can obtain by February 2027 — the access and ethics approvals to use it.

Register on the portal early. The submission runs through the AIBS-hosted system at modresearchgrants.aibs-scores.org. Create the account and walk through the form structure well before September so that formatting limits and required fields do not surprise you in the final week.

Official Links

• Programme page: March of Dimes — Discovery Research Grants
• Application portal: modresearchgrants.aibs-scores.org
• March of Dimes research overview: marchofdimes.org — Research

Dates, amounts, and eligibility above are taken from the official March of Dimes Discovery Research Grants page as published for the current cycle. Funders revise cycle details, so confirm the deadline and requirements on the official page before you submit.