Moore Inventor Fellowship


The Moore Inventor Fellows was a ten-year philanthropic fellowship program of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that provided multi-year support to early-career scientist-inventors developing new tools and technologies. The program operated from 2016 through 2025, selecting five fellows per year for a total of 50 fellows.

History

The program was launched in 2016 and was framed by the foundation as an effort to provide flexible, sustained support to inventors at an early stage of their academic careers, when pursuing tool- and technology-building work can be difficult to fund through conventional research grants. University announcements about the program’s launch described eligibility as spanning early-career researchers at AAU member institutions and a set of additional U.S. institutions selected from NIH funding rankings.

Program structure

Award size and cost share

The fellowship provided a total of US$825,000 over three years per fellow. Business Wire coverage of the program states that the award structure included an institutional commitment of US$50,000 per year from the fellow’s host institution as part of the three-year total.

Nomination model

The program used an institutional nomination model.

Fellows

The foundation selected five Moore Inventor Fellows each year from 2016 through 2025. The table below lists fellows by cohort year and their host institutions at the time of selection.
YearFellowsHost institution at time of award
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025

Coverage

At launch, the program was covered in outlets reporting on philanthropy and technology, including a 2016 article in IEEE Spectrum describing the foundation’s plan to support 50 fellows through a multi-year investment program.