The Murdock Trust aims to enrich the quality of life in the Pacific Northwest by providing grants and support to organizations seeking to strengthen the region’s educational, social, spiritual, and cultural base in creative and sustainable ways.
This grant program, initiated in 2015 and expanded in 2020, aims to facilitate the commercialization of bench discoveries by bringing valuable research discoveries to market. It focuses on supporting projects at major research universities and biomedical research institutes in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. The program is interested in only the highest-priority projects from the natural sciences, medicine, and engineering fields that can create a significant inflection point for commercialization. It offers a two-year grant of up to $75,000 from the Murdock Trust, with a matching requirement from the university, to support early-stage commercialization efforts. These efforts include enabling principal investigators or inventors to reduce the science discovery into practice, secure IP and ownership rights, obtain proof of commercial concept, and position the development toward subsequent funding rounds. The Trust maintains no equity interest in the intellectual property or the commercialization of the invention.