The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded the University of Chicago $3 million to endow the Mellon Scholarly Careers Initiative (MSCI), which will support curriculum development, professional experience, and postdoctoral fellowships for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences.

The donation will be disbursed over the next five years.

MSCI is a joint initiative of the Division of the Humanities, the Division of the Social Sciences, and the Divinity School. A board of advisors will guide the program, led by David Nirenberg, dean of the Divinity School and the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought, and Jason Merchant, vice provost and the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Professor in Linguistics and the College.

In 2017, the Mellon Foundation gave the University $1.45 million towards the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program, which recruits junior scholars from underrepresented groups as fellows with the possibility of promotion to tenure track assistant professorships.