CS-Grants is a private initiative.

After many years as an entrepreneur in his family's bakery business, Ströck, and the hospitality industry, Christoph Ströck (@cstroeckw) developed severe ME/CFS in 2016, leaving him profoundly disabled. Motivated by the severe lack of biomedical research into ME/CFS, he later co-founded the WE&ME Foundation to accelerate research.

Alongside this work, he recognized that some opportunities require a different funding approach. He increasingly supported promising projects through small, private funding across different fields. Catalyzing Science Grants (CS-Grants) formalizes that approach.

We aim to complement traditional science philanthropy, with a particular focus on biomedical research. Larger organizations excel at funding major programs through structured review and broad consensus. Opportunities that are early, small, higher-risk, time-sensitive, or purportedly controversial can be difficult to support within that framework. Those are the opportunities we seek to support.