Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

In 1949, the Carnegie Corporation granted Princeton $100,000 to extend its fellowship program nationwide. Now called the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program—in honor of Princeton’s best-known leader and academic innovator—the effort remained small until 1957. In that year the Ford Foundation granted $24.5 million to support 1,000 fellowships each year for five years, and the program became a new independent nonprofit, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Over the subsequent decade and a half, the Foundation selected and supported more than 15,000 Woodrow Wilson Fellows. These Fellows became intellectual leaders not only within the academy, but also in government, the corporate world, and the nonprofit sector. Today, they include 14 Nobel Laureates, 35 MacArthur Fellows, 16 Pulitzer Prize winners, and hundreds of other distinguished individuals—as well as everyday classroom heroes. As new educational opportunities opened to women and people of color in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation broadened its commitment to opportunities in higher education for the best students from all walks of life. New programs of the era included the Martin Luther King Fellowships, which prepared African-American veterans for public service careers, the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the first and still the only national program supporting young scholars in gender studies. In recent years, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation has continued to cultivate talented emerging leaders for both the academy and public service, administering programs like the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs 2007 Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs FellowsFellowships, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships, and the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellows (MMUF) Dissertation Grants and Travel/Research Grants.