Feldstein Medical Foundation Inc.

Feldstein Medical Foundation (FMF) is a small, tightly-run family foundation — founded 2007 by the Feldstein family, with David Feldstein as President, Daniel Feldstein as Treasurer, Wendy King as Vice President and Anne Baretz as Secretary, none of them compensated. It funds a single cause (medical research) through a single mechanism: invitation-only seed grants to junior faculty at a fixed roster of NY/NJ academic medical centers — Columbia, Weill Cornell, NYU Grossman, Albert Einstein, Stony Brook, Rutgers (RWJMS/NJMS), Hospital for Special Surgery, and the SUNY Research Foundation. This roster has been essentially unchanged since 2009, with each partner institution typically contributing one nominee per cycle. There is no public LOI or open call: FMF's own site states applications are "accepted by invitation only," and institutions like Stony Brook run their own internal limited competition (instructions revised annually, most recently 1-10-25) to select the single nominee they forward to grants@feldsteinmedicalfoundation.org. For a grant seeker, the actionable path is not a direct approach to the foundation but a relationship with your institution's sponsored-research or proposal-development office — that office is the actual gatekeeper for FMF eligibility. FMF explicitly favors "promising junior investigators" at the assistant-professor level who already have "a history of some prior funding," meaning this is a bridge/seed fund for researchers who have shown fundability, not a foundation for first-time grant-seekers or graduate trainees. Eligible PIs must hold a doctoral degree in medicine, nursing, public health, health care or biomedical sciences and hold an appointment at one of the invited institutions. Because the applicant pool is capped by institutional nomination rather than open competition, the real bottleneck is winning your own institution's internal review, not out-competing a national pool. First-time applicants should treat this as a two-stage process: first secure your institution's single annual nomination slot, then meet FMF's substantive bar for "new or innovative" research with "maximum beneficial impact" — the same language recurs across every FMF-facing document reviewed.

FMF's asset base has been essentially flat for over a decade — $5,543,139 in 2011 to $5,215,147 in FY2023 — funded almost entirely by net investment income ($339,242 in FY2023, $472,898 in FY2021) rather than new contributions; the foundation received no new contributions in any year reviewed except $250,000 (2011) and $20,058 (2014). Annual giving has swung considerably: FY2020 saw a spike to $712,054 in total giving ($639,569 in grants paid), while FY2019 was a near-total pause — $0 in grants paid and just $62,753 in total giving, the only gap year in the record. Giving then settled into a steadier band: $429,478 (FY2021), $424,342 (FY2022) and $388,463 (FY2023), with grants paid of $350,000, $350,000 and $320,000 respectively. The DB's own grantee-level sample (9 grants, 7 institutions, $670,000 total) shows a median award of $80,000 and a range of $70,000-$150,000 (the $150,000 figures at Rutgers and Weill Cornell reflect two grants each within the sample, not a single larger award). Web research confirms this: FMF's own materials cite typical awards of "$75,000-$80,000" per investigator, and the 2026 cycle's six named grantees at roughly that per-award size sum to the reported ~$450,000 in 2026 giving — a step up from the $320,000-$388,463 paid in 2022-2023 and the four-grantee, ~$300K-$320K 2025 cycle. Geographically, funding is concentrated 100% in the NY/NJ metro academic medical corridor (Columbia, Cornell, NYU, Einstein, Stony Brook, Rutgers, Hospital for Special Surgery, SUNY) despite website language describing a secondary "nationwide" scope — no non-NY/NJ grantee appears anywhere in the 2009-2026 grantee list reviewed. By program area, awards split fairly evenly across basic science, translational/early clinical research, and occasional medical-education-research projects (e.g., the 2013 Mount Sinai burnout-intervention grant), with no single sub-field dominating any given year.

All five peers cluster within roughly $2,500 of Feldstein's $5,247,517 asset base — an asset-matched cohort of small private foundations filed under the generic "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE code, which functions as a catch-all for grantmaking vehicles rather than a true field-of-work signal, and none has a public website (except Rowley) or disclosed giving pattern in this data set. Feldstein stands apart from this cohort for being unusually well-documented — an active website, an 18-year single-cause track record naming its board and every grantee since 2009, and partner-institution nomination pages at Stony Brook and Weill Cornell — which makes it far easier for grant seekers to research and approach than a same-sized peer with no public footprint.

The most concrete recent signal is FMF's own "Prior Funding" grantee list, which shows the 2026 cycle expanding to six named investigators — Melanie Smith (Hospital for Special Surgery, synovial lining hyperplasia in osteoarthritis), Gilbert Rahme and Zhaoqing Cong (both Stony Brook), Akanksha Thawani (Columbia), Joshua Siegel (NYU Grossman) and Luke Andrea (Albert Einstein) — up from four in the 2025 cycle (Gaetan Barbet at Rutgers RWJ, Logan Grosenick at Weill Cornell, Sandra Aleksic at Albert Einstein, and Sima Mofakham at Stony Brook). At roughly $75,000-$80,000 per award, that implies 2026 total giving near $450,000, a step up from the $320,000-$388,463 paid in FY2022-2023 IRS filings. Stony Brook's Office of Proposal Development republished its internal FMF nomination instructions on 1-10-25, confirming the foundation's invitation-only cycle is still active and administered annually through partner research offices rather than any change in process. No leadership changes were found — David Feldstein (President), Daniel Feldstein (Treasurer), Wendy King (Vice President) and Anne Baretz (Secretary) remain the same board across all IRS filings reviewed (2011-2023) and all bear zero compensation. No dedicated press coverage or news announcements from 2025-2026 were found beyond the foundation's own grantee list and partner-institution funding-opportunity pages; the most recent third-party press item located was a 2013 Stony Brook News release on a Markus Seeliger award, well outside the current window.

There is no public application form or open deadline — FMF states plainly that grants are "accepted by invitation only," so the highest-leverage move is building a relationship with your own institution's sponsored-research or proposal-development office, not contacting the foundation directly. Institutions in the network (Columbia, Weill Cornell, NYU Grossman, Albert Einstein, Stony Brook, Rutgers RWJMS/NJMS, Hospital for Special Surgery, SUNY Research Foundation) each run an internal limited competition to pick the single nominee they forward to grants@feldsteinmedicalfoundation.org — Stony Brook's version is revised and reposted every January (most recently 1-10-25), so check with your research office for the current internal deadline well before then. Eligibility is specific: a doctoral degree in medicine, nursing, public health, health care or biomedical sciences, and an active appointment at one of the invited institutions — proposals from outside this roster of eight institutions have effectively no path, regardless of scientific merit. FMF explicitly prioritizes junior investigators at the assistant-professor level who already have some prior extramural funding, so first-year postdocs or investigators with zero funding history are a weaker fit than a newly-independent PI building on a K-award or small pilot grant. In framing the proposal, echo FMF's own stated criteria verbatim where genuinely applicable: "new or innovative," a "seed-type" project, work with "maximum beneficial impact on health or healthcare practice for significant populations," and potential for "significant advancements in scientific knowledge." Size the ask to their actual pattern — typical awards are $70,000-$80,000 for a single year, with occasional larger multi-grant relationships (Rutgers and Weill Cornell have each received $150,000 across two grants); requests well above $150,000 fall outside anything FMF has funded. The single most common mistake is applying without an institutional nomination — FMF has no mechanism for direct individual submissions outside the eight-institution network, so cold outreach to the foundation's email is useful only for eligibility questions, not as a submission channel.