Science Catalyst Grants (formerly known as “Enabling Science Grants”) have been a mainstay of LSST Discovery Alliance (LSST-DA) support for the Rubin LSST community since 2015.
Initially supported by gifts from Microsoft visionaries Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi, these grants help the community maximize the scientific impact of Rubin Observatory’s LSST by supporting bold ideas, inclusive participation, and interdisciplinarity.
Program Success
This program prioritizes engagement with students and early career researchers and is designed to provide low barrier of entry playgrounds for innovation, science community impact, and new scientific networks. It has:
- paved the way for new ideas to turn into enduring programs
- provided collaborative spaces for new scientific ideas to be explored
- invited new people to the Rubin LSST scientific table
- supported undergraduate and graduate student training
Specific examples of success include:
- The original 2015 grant supporting Data Science Fellowship Program (DSFP) – Now in its tenth year, the DSFP is a highly oversubscribed grad student training program with applicants from around the world
- Grants to send students to present their work at scientific meetings – Now an annual summer student program that engages a diverse set of students in cohort building, networking, and training
- Support for the LSST@Europe meeting series
- Support for dozens of scientific conferences and collaboration meetings
Past Grant Awardees
Learn about the exciting work of our past grant awardees.
- 2021 Science Catalyst Grant Awardees
- 2020 Science Catalyst Grant Awardees
- 2020 AGN Challenge Awardees
- 2015-2019 Science Catalyst Grants Program Highlights
Inclusive Collaboration Projects (2023 – 2025)
A term-limited Inclusive Collaboration grants program was designed in in 2023 to develop, document, and disseminate policies and best practices related to inclusive collaboration. This program was fully funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation. LSST-DA selected projects from an international, open call for proposals that built on the From Data to Software to Science (DS2) workshop held in 2022 at the Flatiron Institute. The DS2 report’s recommendations for inclusive collaboration best practices centered on:
- Building sustainable cross-institutional partnerships
- Strategies for dealing with authorship
- Strategies for fostering an inclusive team environment
- Strategies for working with students