The Grass Foundation
In the fall of 1935, Albert M. Grass and Ellen H. Robinson both came to the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). This entirely fortuitous confluence of their lives led to their marriage, to a commercial endeavor the Grass Instrument Company that would provide equipment of high quality to neuroscientists and other physiologists for over half a century, and finally to the formation of The Grass Foundation, which has benefited the neuroscience community since 1955. The picture to the left shows Ellen and Albert in 1955.
The Value of the Grass Fellowship
2025 Kavli-Grass Fellow Christian Hoffmann is fascinated by resilience and adaptation, so he studies how nudibranchs are affected by ocean acidification.
News
The Grass Foundation Trustees have selected three recipients for the 2026 Henry Grass Rising Stars in Neuroscience Award: Daniel Cardozo Pinto, Maribel Patiño, and Whitney Stevens-Sostre.
The 75th cohort of Grass Fellows arrived in Woods Hole to begin their residency in the Grass Laboratory. Since 1951, the Grass Fellowship Program has brought early-career investigators to the Grass Laboratory at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) for 14 weeks to pursue a self-designed,
The Grass Foundation is pleased to announce the 2026 Grass Fellows. This year’s cohort marks the 75th anniversary of the Grass Fellowship Program. Since 1951,
Outreach
The Grass Foundation assists in advancing knowledge in neuroscience. The Foundation promotes scientific excellence by enabling and catalyzing scientific discovery across, rather than within the confines of individual academic institutions. As part of this mission, the Foundation wants to make education in neuroscience and mechanistic scientific reasoning more broadly accessible, to communities where these approaches are not currently practiced.
Grants & Awards
The Grass Foundation administers the annual Henry Grass Rising Stars in Neuroscience Award and has endowed the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience through the Society for Neuroscience, and the Grass Foundation–ANA Award in Neuroscience through the American Neurological Association.