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. This fortuitous confluence of their lives led to their marriage and a commercial endeavor — the Grass Instrument Company — that would provide equipment 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 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
For those traveling to the 2026 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., you can catch up with Grass Fellows and their recent work.
2018 Grass Fellow Tessa Montague was featured in The New York Times as part of the “Unknowns” series, in which 100 scientists share some of the biggest questions in science today.
Starting September 1, 2026, The Grass Foundation will open its application for the 2027 Grass Fellowship. Grass Fellows spend 14 weeks at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole,
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.