Founding
The Institute of FAME, Inc. was incorporated as a Georgia nonprofit on November 9, 2016 (Georgia Secretary of State control number 16105972) and received its IRS Determination Letter as a 501(c)(3) public charity on January 17, 2017. The institute is headquartered in Atlanta and operates on a calendar fiscal year, filing Form 990 annually.
FAME holds the IRS's 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) public-charity classification — the preferred classification for receiving foundation grants and individual donations. Contributions are tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law.
What we fund
FAME funds peer-reviewed research and validated psychometric instruments on the financial decisions that shape under-resourced lives. Our funded studies address financial decision-making by under-resourced consumers, regulatory-sandbox impacts on banking competition, FinTech adoption in small and mid-sized enterprises, and the measurement tools that personal-finance education programs depend on. We work with independent investigators whose research agendas are aligned with our mission, and our funding is free of financial-services-industry sponsorship.
Research outputs from FAME-funded and FAME-affiliated investigators have appeared in Economies, Journal of Risk and Financial Management, PLOS ONE, IEEE Access, Knowledge-Based Systems, PeerJ Computer Science, Applied Sciences, and Springer's Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems series.
How we operate
FAME is intentionally small. The institute commissions and funds studies, retains intellectual property in validated instruments, and partners with commercial Institutional Review Boards for ethics review when human-subjects research is involved. Instrument-validation studies typically run $3,500–$5,500 end-to-end; mid-size grant programs ($20,000–$50,000) fund extended replication and cross-population work.
Funding decisions are made by leadership with a substantive peer-reviewed track record. The institute's founder and Chair, Dr. Patrick Bernard Washington, has authored or co-authored 14 peer-reviewed publications with 1,111 citations, an h-index of 11, and an i10-index of 12 (Google Scholar, May 2026; OpenAlex confirms 817 citations / h-10 from the formal-database subset). The complete publication list — with the two FAME-funded papers identified separately — is available on the Papers page.
