Simons Collaborations in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences 2027: Up to $2 Million a Year for Four Years, Extendable to Seven, With Letters of Intent Closing 29 October 2026

Simons Collaborations in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences 2027: Up to $2 Million a Year for Four Years, Extendable to Seven, With Letters of Intent Closing 29 October 2026

Very few private funders will hand a group of theorists eight million dollars and tell them to go work on one question together. The Simons Collaborations in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences program is one of them. It funds a scientific community rather than a lab: a director, a group of principal investigators spread across institutions and often across countries, a stream of postdocs and graduate students, a visitor programme, and the meetings that hold all of it together for the better part of a decade.

The next cycle is running now. Letters of intent are due 29 October 2026 at 12 p.m. (noon) Eastern time, decisions on those letters arrive around 1 January 2027, invited full proposals are due 24 February 2027 at noon Eastern time, and awards are announced around 1 July 2027. Funding then begins 1 January 2028 and runs to 31 December 2031. The foundation expects to establish up to three new collaborations in this round.

This guide covers what the award actually pays for, the eligibility rules that quietly disqualify otherwise excellent teams, how the two-stage application works in the Simons Award Manager, and what distinguishes a letter of intent that gets invited forward from one that does not.

Key Details

What the Award Pays For

The budget ceiling is up to $2 million per year for four years, and that figure is inclusive of 20 percent indirect costs. This matters more than it might seem. If your institution is used to negotiating a federally approved indirect rate in the fifties, the arithmetic here is different: the overhead comes out of the same $2 million, not on top of it, and it is capped at 20 percent. When you build the budget, work backwards from the total, not forwards from direct costs.

Within that envelope, the programme is unusually flexible about what the money can do:

• Summer salary. Up to one month of summer salary per year for the director and for each principal investigator and co-investigator.
• Teaching reduction. A teaching buyout is available for the director only, and even then the director is expected to keep teaching a minimum of one course per semester. This is not a route to a permanent release from the classroom.
• Postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Salary and support for research personnel is a core allowable cost, and in practice postdoc lines are the engine of most collaborations.
• Visitors and collaborators. Support for people who are not formally on the award but whose presence advances the science.
• Meetings, workshops, conferences, travel, and lodging. The connective tissue of a distributed collaboration.
• A collaboration administrator. A salaried person to run logistics. Do not treat this as optional overhead — a seven-year, multi-institution effort with a visitor programme and an annual meeting needs professional coordination, and reviewers know it.
• Equipment, supplies, and research expenses, where they genuinely serve the science.

Separately, the foundation hosts an annual two-day collaboration meeting at its offices, and the cost of that meeting is covered outside the grant budget. Attendance is expected of each collaboration member; it is not a token event but the venue where progress is presented and, at year three or four, where the case for extension is effectively made.

Who This Is For

This is a programme for a team with a specific, timely scientific opening, not for a group that shares a broad interest. The foundation’s framing is precise: the collaboration should address a mathematical or theoretical topic of fundamental scientific importance where a significant, new development creates a novel area for exploration. Both halves of that sentence carry weight. Fundamental importance alone is not enough — plenty of important problems have been important for fifty years. What the programme wants is a reason why now is the moment: a recent theorem, technique, experimental result, or conceptual bridge that has opened territory that a coordinated group can take in a way that individual investigators cannot.

Eligible fields are mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer science. Chemistry is explicitly out of scope. Experimental components are permitted where they are essential to the science, but the centre of gravity has to be theoretical.

On team size, the foundation’s guidance suggests a minimum of roughly seven to eight principal investigators. Multi-institutional structure is not formally required, but a collaboration built entirely inside one department will need a strong explanation for why it counts as a collaboration rather than a large group grant. International participation is welcome, with the geographic restrictions noted below.

If you are an individual theorist looking for personal research support, this is the wrong instrument — look instead at the foundation’s individual fellowship and investigator programmes, or at the Targeted Grants to Institutes programme if you are representing an established centre.

Eligibility Rules That Catch People Out

The scientific bar is high, but the rules that most often eliminate teams are administrative. Read these carefully before you invest in a narrative.

Director rank and institution. The director must hold a tenured faculty position, or equivalent, at an educational institution with a Ph.D. program. Tenure-track is not sufficient for the director role. Principal investigators and co-investigators must hold a tenured or tenure-track position, or equivalent.

The two-LOI, one-proposal rule. Any individual may appear on no more than two letters of intent, and on only one full proposal. If two teams are courting the same senior person, that person needs to decide early which full proposal they will join, and both teams need to know before the LOI is filed.

Active collaboration members are excluded. If you are currently a member of a funded Simons Collaboration, you cannot participate in a new letter of intent or proposal in this round. This clears space for new groups and is enforced.

Institutional restrictions. U.S. and foreign public and private educational institutions and research centers are eligible. Funding may not flow to U.S. national laboratories — though scientists based at national labs may participate on an unfunded basis — nor to institutions in China or Hong Kong, nor to for-profit entities. Simons Foundation W-2 employees may not serve as principal investigator.

Overlap with other Simons awards. Simons Fellows and Simons Investigators remain eligible. Active Math+X Investigators are not.

One structural point that is easy to miss: additional principal investigators may be added after the LOI is approved. That is a real piece of flexibility. It means the letter of intent should present the strongest, clearest core of the team rather than an exhaustive roster assembled for political balance. You can broaden between January and February 2027 once you know you have been invited forward.

The Two-Stage Application Process

Everything is submitted through the Simons Award Manager (SAM) at https://sam.simonsfoundation.org/, and the submission is made by the proposed director.

Stage one: the letter of intent (due 29 October 2026)

The LOI is deliberately short. It comprises:

• A three-page narrative, plus up to one additional page for references and figures. The narrative should cover the topic, the scientific approach, the logistics of how the collaboration will operate, and any preliminary results.
• Biosketches for all principal investigators and co-investigators. SciENcv, NIH, or NSF format is accepted, and a two-to-three page CV is acceptable in place of a formal biosketch.
• Up to ten relevant publications for the director.
• Current and pending funding documentation.

Letters of intent are reviewed by Simons Foundation scientific staff. This is worth internalising: the first gate is programme staff, not a panel of subject specialists. The three pages need to be legible to a scientifically literate reader who may not work in your exact subfield, and the case for why the moment is right has to survive that translation.

Stage two: the full proposal (invited, due 24 February 2027)

Invited teams submit a substantially larger package:

• A twelve-page narrative, plus up to two pages for references and figures.
• Biosketches for all personnel on each individual application.
• Detailed four-year budgets with justifications.
• Publications and current-and-pending funding documentation for all principal investigators and co-investigators.

Full proposals are reviewed by Simons Foundation scientific staff together with an expert external review committee, and teams may be asked to present their research plans. Budget your winter accordingly: roughly four months separate the LOI outcome from the full-proposal deadline, and much of that window will go to assembling institutional budget paperwork across every participating site.

Preparation Strategy and What Reviewers Look For

Lead with the opening, not the field. The single most consequential paragraph in the LOI answers: what changed recently, and what does it now make possible? A narrative that opens with a survey of how important the area is reads like every other submission. One that opens with a concrete development — a result, a construction, a new class of examples, a measurement — and then shows the terrain it exposes, reads like a collaboration with a reason to exist.

Justify the collaboration structure, not just the science. Reviewers are funding a collaboration. Be explicit about why this problem needs seven or eight investigators with complementary expertise rather than three independent grants. Name the intellectual seams — where one PI’s technique meets another’s problem — and describe the mechanism (workshops, extended visits, shared postdocs, a summer programme) that will actually bring those seams together.

Take the logistics section seriously. The LOI is asked to address collaboration logistics in only three pages, which tempts teams to spend all of it on science. Resist. A few tight sentences on governance, meeting cadence, postdoc placement and mentoring, and how the administrator will operate signal that the team has thought about running a seven-year enterprise.

Plan for the year three or four evaluation from day one. The extension into years five through seven is decided on the basis of the evaluation at the year three or four annual meeting, and nothing is funded beyond year seven. Design a research programme with visible intermediate results — things that can be presented at an annual meeting well before year four — rather than one whose payoff is entirely back-loaded.

Build the budget backwards. With a $2 million per-year ceiling inclusive of 20 percent indirect costs, roughly $1.6 million per year is available for direct costs. Postdoc lines across multiple institutions, a visitor programme, workshops, and an administrator consume that quickly. Get real institutional numbers early rather than estimates.

Use the contacts. The MPS team keeps office hours Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time, at [email protected] for programme questions and [email protected] for SAM technical issues. Note the office closures around the deadline season: 25–27 November 2026 and 24 December 2026 through 1 January 2027. Do not plan to resolve a submission problem during those windows.

Common Mistakes

• Missing the noon deadline. Both deadlines are at 12 p.m. Eastern, not midnight. Every year, someone treats a stated deadline as end-of-day and loses a cycle.
• A director who is tenure-track. Tenure-track is fine for PIs and co-investigators; the director must be tenured, at an institution with a Ph.D. programme.
• Double-booking a key person. Two LOIs is the limit, one full proposal is the limit. Sort this out during team formation.
• Including a national lab, Chinese, Hong Kong, or for-profit institution as a funded partner. Colleagues at national labs can participate unfunded; the others cannot receive funds at all.
• Treating the LOI as a mini full proposal. Three pages does not accommodate a literature review. It accommodates a claim, a plan, and evidence that the team can execute.
• Budgeting indirect costs on top of the ceiling. They come out of it, capped at 20 percent.
• Assuming the roster is locked at LOI stage. It is not — you can add PIs after approval, so optimise the LOI for clarity.
• Applying with a chemistry-adjacent topic. Chemistry is explicitly ineligible, however theoretical the framing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can we reapply if our letter of intent is not approved? Yes. An unapproved LOI does not bar a future application.

Is a multi-institution team required? Multi-institutional structure is not explicitly required, but the programme is designed around collaboration, and a single-department application carries a heavier burden of explanation.

Can the collaboration include experimental work? Yes, where the experimental component is essential to the science. The core must remain theoretical.

How many PIs should we have? Foundation guidance suggests a minimum of about seven to eight principal investigators.

Are non-U.S. researchers eligible? Yes. International participation and funding to foreign educational institutions and research centers is permitted, excluding institutions in China and Hong Kong.

Can a current Simons Fellow or Simons Investigator join? Yes. Active Math+X Investigators cannot, and members of an active Simons Collaboration cannot.

What happens after year four? An evaluation at the year three or four annual meeting determines whether three additional years (five through seven) are funded. Support does not continue past year seven.

Does the annual meeting come out of our budget? No. The costs of the foundation-hosted annual meeting are covered separately from the grant budget.

Timeline at a Glance

Official Links and Next Steps

• Programme page: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-collaborations-in-mathematics-and-the-physical-sciences/
• Submission portal (Simons Award Manager): https://sam.simonsfoundation.org/
• Programme questions: [email protected]
• Technical questions: [email protected]

If you are considering a submission for this cycle, the practical sequence between now and late October is short. Settle the director and the core PI group first, since the two-LOI rule means people cannot be committed twice over. Then write the three-page narrative around the specific development that makes the moment right, and have someone outside your subfield read it — programme staff are the first gate, and clarity to a non-specialist is the currency at that stage. Assemble biosketches and current-and-pending documentation in parallel, because collecting them across seven or eight institutions takes longer than anyone expects. Finally, register the director’s SAM account well before the deadline; a portal problem discovered on 29 October is a problem discovered too late.

Details on this page reflect the Simons Foundation’s published programme information as of 6 August 2026. Confirm figures, dates, and eligibility against the official programme page before submitting, as the foundation revises guidance between cycles.