The Science Foundation
Public Science, Public Good
What Ifs…?
Request for Reviewers – Apply here!
Fall 2025
Preamble
The Science Foundation, a new non-profit, non-partisan organization, is running an inaugural competition to fund approximately five to ten up to $10,000 research projects in all domains of basic science. We are seeking to (i) support the basic science research ecosystem, (ii) increase public visibility and engagement with science, and (iii) experiment with new, efficient ways of evaluating proposals. We have designed an evaluation process that we hope will be exciting and engaging for our reviewers, and we would be honored if you would consider participating and sharing your expertise with us. All reviewers will receive an honorarium in recognition of their service.
Our Evaluation Process
We will adopt a two-stage evaluation process, and you are invited to participate in one or both as your schedule and interest allows. Given that this is a new process, we are planning for either a review process occurring in December or January, depending on the timing of quality applications we receive.
Stage One: Initial Screening in an area of your expertise
After a preliminary check by the SciFdn team to remove applications that are outside the scope of our program, we will assemble up to 20 applications per reviewer for preliminary evaluation. Each application will be viewed by two reviewers. You will be asked to view up to 20 three-minute project pitch videos, which are each accompanied by a brief written application, and answer the following question:
1.1) How well does this pitch meet the two SciFdn review criteria (scientific merit and sparking curiosity) on a scale of 1 (not well at all) to 4 (extremely well)?
We anticipate that initial screening will take 2 hours of your time.
Stage Two: Review and Panel Discussion
The top applications, based on stage one, will be moved to panel. Our goal is to select projects that are both scientifically sound and present inspiring ideas to a broad audience, so in stage two the reviewers of each application will be (i) a faculty domain expert; (ii) a faculty non-expert; (iii) a middle or high-school science teacher. Each reviewer will be asked to consider up to 10 applications and answer the following three questions:
2.1.a) How exciting is the proposed scientific question? [1-4]
2.1.b) Why do you find it exciting or not exciting? [text]
2.2.a) Is the approach appropriate for the question being asked? [1-4]
2.2.b) What could improve the approach, if you rated it <4? [text]
2.3.a) How well does the proposer communicate their curiosity and inspiration? [1-4]
2.3.b) What inspired you the most? [text]
Please note that we are excluding traditional objective criteria, such as publication record or institutional prestige, so our review criteria are necessarily and deliberately subjective. After reviews are submitted, we will hold a panel discussion with members of the SciFdn team to discuss the merits of each application. Panel discussions will be recorded for internal use only; we’d like to capture the discussions in the interest of reflection and improvement of our process.
We anticipate that stage two will require 1 hour of pre-panel work (viewing and scoring 10 applications) and 2 hours of panel time.
Sounds Exciting! How do I participate?
If you are interested in serving as a “What Ifs…? ” reviewer, please complete the reviewer survey here [LINK]. We aim to notify a short list of reviewers by Nov 26th and plan to make final reviewer selections in early December. We recognize that this is a short turnaround time and hope that our efficient process and provision of honoraria will enable great panels to be assembled to have productive and inspiring discussions. We’d like all reviewers to gain enthusiasm and connections from this process, in addition to helping support fundamental scientific research through their discussions.