Most SLP faculty know that ASHFoundation exists. Far fewer have mapped the full portfolio of what it actually funds.
That gap matters more than it might seem. ASHFoundation is the primary philanthropic funder of clinical research and professional development in speech-language pathology and audiology, and it runs multiple grant mechanisms that target university programs specifically: from $4,000 student research awards to $75,000 clinical research grants to collaboration awards that most departments have never heard of.1 If your program knows about one or two of these, you're already ahead of most. If you've mapped all of them and built a departmental strategy around them, you're in a small minority.
This post covers every ASHFoundation grant relevant to university SLP and audiology programs, what each one funds, who's eligible, and how to think about them as part of a longer research funding strategy.
Clinical Research Grants: The Biggest Opportunity ($50,000-$75,000)
The ASHFoundation Clinical Research Grant is the mechanism that most university faculty would benefit from most, and the one that's most underused relative to the opportunity it represents.
Award amounts range from $50,000 to $75,000. Eligibility is open to investigators at any career stage, which surprises a lot of people who assume it targets early-career researchers only. The stated purpose is to fund the development and evaluation of evidence-based practices, which is exactly the kind of clinical work happening in university training clinics every day.1
What makes this mechanism particularly valuable for university programs is its design intent. ASHFoundation isn't just trying to fund one-off studies. The Clinical Research Grant is explicitly positioned as a bridge instrument: its purpose is to build investigator capacity to compete for federal funding, particularly from NIH and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).2 That's a meaningful distinction. A grant designed to help you get more grants is strategically different from a standalone award.
For faculty researchers at university SLP programs, the clinical infrastructure you already have is an asset here. Access to a real patient population, existing IRB workflows, a clinical supervisor structure, and the ability to collect longitudinal outcomes data all make university clinic studies competitive. The question is how you frame the research question: applied, clinically grounded, and designed to scale.
Strong applications tend to center on a specific gap in evidence-based practice: an intervention protocol with limited outcome data, an assessment tool whose diagnostic validity hasn't been studied in a particular population, or a clinical workflow question that would benefit from systematic study. If your clinic is already doing something informally that you believe is working well, that's often the seed of a fundable research question.
Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration Grants: The Underused Mechanism ($35,000 x Up to 4 Grants)
Here's the mechanism that almost nobody talks about: the ASHFoundation Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration Grant.
Award amounts are up to $35,000 per team, and up to four grants are available per cycle, which makes this significantly less competitive than the Clinical Research Grant. The structure of the award requires a team pairing a PhD researcher with a practitioner, and the research question has to sit at the intersection of academic inquiry and real-world clinical application.1
If you work at a university SLP program, you almost certainly already have the right team. A faculty researcher in your department paired with a clinic supervisor is exactly the pairing ASHFoundation is looking for. The research question doesn't have to be groundbreaking; it has to be genuinely collaborative, grounded in practice, and designed to produce findings that practitioners can actually use.
What makes this worth paying attention to: many departments assume they need a single star researcher to anchor their grant applications. The Researcher-Practitioner mechanism shifts that assumption. The person closest to patients every day (the clinic director, the supervising clinician) is a co-investigator, not just a subject. That changes both the competitiveness of the application and the clinical relevance of the work.
If the Clinical Research Grant feels like too big a lift right now, this is often the right starting point. It funds meaningful work, it's designed for the team structure you have, and it builds the research track record that strengthens future applications.
Early-Career and Student Mechanisms: Building Research Output at Every Level
Four ASHFoundation mechanisms target early-career investigators and students. Used strategically, these are stepping stones, not just one-off awards.
New Century Scholars Research Grant awards $5,000 to investigators within five years of earning their doctoral degree. If you have junior faculty who finished their PhD in the last few years, this is the mechanism designed for them. It funds pilot work: the kind of small-scale study that generates the preliminary data needed to support a larger application later.1
New Investigators Research Grant awards $10,000 to doctoral candidates currently enrolled in PhD programs. This is an opportunity your department's PhD students should know about from day one, not from a listserv notice two weeks before the deadline. A strong application builds your departmental research output and strengthens the student's CV in the same stroke.
Student Research Grant in Audiology awards up to $4,000 to AuD or PhD students studying audiology. The award is designed to fund focused pilot studies, and the application process gives students early experience with grant writing, which is itself a professional competency worth building.
Student Research Grant in Early Childhood Language awards up to $4,000 to MS or PhD students whose research focuses on early childhood language development. If your department has graduate students working in early intervention, this mechanism is directly relevant.1
The faculty role here isn't passive. Departments that do well with ASHA grants speech language pathology mechanisms tend to have a faculty member who identifies strong candidates early, connects them with mentors, and helps them understand how to frame a research question for a grant application. That takes maybe a few hours of mentorship, and the return is a student grant award that benefits both the student and the program.
Think of these as feeders. A PhD student who wins a $10,000 New Investigators grant is already demonstrating fundability. A junior faculty member who wins a New Century Scholars award has pilot data. Both are better positioned to compete for the Clinical Research Grant when the time comes.
The ASHA Culture, Language, and Identity Grant: A Different Program Worth Knowing ($7,000-$15,000)
This one requires a clarification upfront: the Culture, Language, and Identity Grant is an ASHA grant, not an ASHFoundation grant. The two organizations are related but separate, and the grant programs operate independently.3
Award amounts range from $7,000 to $15,000. University programs are explicitly listed as eligible. The requirement is that an ASHA member serve as project director. Priority is given to projects that increase cultural responsiveness in clinical services and that address the communication needs of diverse and underserved populations.3
If your department has faculty with active scholarship in multilingual populations, dialectal variation, health equity in communication disorders, or culturally adapted assessment practices, this mechanism fits that work directly. It's also one of the few grant programs in the ASHA ecosystem that explicitly invites university programs to apply rather than treating them as one possible applicant type among many.
Application cycles typically open in the fall and close in the spring. The 2026 cycle closed on April 20, so if you missed it, the next cycle is worth planning for now rather than scrambling for it later.
Worth noting: many university SLP faculty who would be strong candidates for this grant don't realize it exists because it doesn't come up in the same conversations as ASHFoundation mechanisms. If your department has a DEI initiative or a faculty member whose research touches on cultural or linguistic diversity in clinical practice, put this on your radar.
Using ASHFoundation as a Federal Funding Pathway
The single most strategic thing you can understand about ASHFoundation Clinical Research Grants is that they're designed to lead somewhere. The stated goal isn't just to fund good research; it's to develop investigators who can compete for federal funding.1
For university SLP and audiology programs, that federal funding primarily means NIDCD (the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders). NIDCD is the NIH institute responsible for research on communication disorders, and it's the primary federal funder of clinical speech-language pathology and audiology research.2 An R01 from NIDCD is a different order of magnitude than an ASHFoundation award, and it requires a research track record that most junior faculty don't have when they're starting out.
The sequence that works: use an ASHFoundation Clinical Research Grant to fund a well-designed study, generate publishable findings and pilot data, then use that track record to build a competitive NIDCD application. That's not an accident of the funding ecosystem. It's how ASHFoundation explicitly frames the purpose of the Clinical Research Grant.
There's a downstream implication worth mentioning for department chairs: NIDCD also funds training programs through T32 and T35 mechanisms. These are institutional grants that support doctoral and postdoctoral training in communication disorders research. Institutions competing for T32 and T35 awards need to demonstrate research productivity, which means faculty publication records, existing grant funding, and evidence of a genuine research training environment. An ASHFoundation-funded research portfolio contributes directly to that case.
The departments that use ASHFoundation grants most effectively aren't just applying for individual awards. They're building research infrastructure over five to ten years, with each grant creating the evidence base that makes the next application stronger.
Application Timing and What Makes Proposals Competitive
ASHFoundation operates on annual application cycles, and deadlines shift from year to year. The best source for current deadlines is ASHFoundation.org; checking directly is always more reliable than relying on department memory from previous years.1
Most ASHFoundation mechanisms require the same core components: a research plan, an evaluation plan, investigator qualifications, and a budget justification. That's the same basic architecture as most federal grant applications, which is one reason these awards are good preparation for applying to NIH later.
What makes university clinic applications competitive in practice:
Your clinic already has access to a real patient population with documented clinical needs. That's not something every applicant can say. If your IRB infrastructure is already in place and you can demonstrate an existing consent and data collection process, you're further along than many applicants before you've written a single sentence of the proposal.
Departmental support matters too. Protected research time, an institutional letter of support, and a named research mentor all signal to reviewers that the project will actually get done. Junior faculty applicants who have strong mentorship backing tend to rate higher on the feasibility dimension of the review.
For early-career faculty specifically, applying for a New Century Scholars grant before the Clinical Research Grant is often the right sequence. You build a track record, get reviewer feedback, and generate pilot data. That puts you in a much stronger position the next time around.
One more practical note: the Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration mechanism is worth revisiting every cycle even if you're also pursuing the Clinical Research Grant. The team structure you already have at a university clinic qualifies you, the competition is lower (four awards rather than one pool), and a $35,000 award still funds meaningful work.
Ready to Build the Research Infrastructure Your Clinic Needs?
ASHFoundation has more mechanisms than most faculty realize: from $4,000 student grants to $75,000 clinical research awards, plus collaboration grants that fit the team structure of most university programs. The most valuable long-term strategy is treating these mechanisms as a deliberate pathway toward federal funding rather than isolated opportunities.
If your university clinic is building a research portfolio, the documentation and reporting infrastructure underneath that work matters. ClinicNote's reporting features (including patient outcome tracking, custom reporting, and standardized clinical records) are designed to support the kind of data collection that evidence-based practice studies require. Request a demo to see how ClinicNote supports university SLP and audiology programs.
Sources
- https://www.ashfoundation.org/grants/
- https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/funding/types/research-project-grants
- https://www.asha.org/about/governance/grant-programs/culture-language-identity-grant/
- https://www.asha.org/research/nidcd/
- https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-24-256.html