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 do
FAME conducts and funds peer-reviewed research on how under-resourced consumers actually make financial decisions — and turns it into two things people can use: policy translation (positions, briefs, and regulatory comments for the agencies writing the rules) and financial-education programs and tools that put the findings directly in people's hands. Our flagship in-house research is the Maturity Type Indicator (MTI) program; our funded studies span regulatory-sandbox impacts on banking competition, FinTech adoption in small and mid-sized enterprises, and the measurement tools personal-finance education programs depend on. We work with independent investigators whose research agendas align with our mission, and our funding is free of financial-services-industry sponsorship. As a matter of policy, the institute's research conclusions are reached independently of the positions and views of its funders, and FAME discloses its institutional funders.
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 conducts and funds studies, retains intellectual property in the psychometric instruments it develops, 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.
How our research drives change
FAME exists to move evidence into decisions and into people's hands. Our research becomes change two ways: policy — positions, briefs, and, as the work matures, regulatory comments and testimony for the agencies writing the rules; and education — programs and tools that translate the findings for the consumers and practitioners who can use them. We take no partisan side; we put sound evidence where it does the most good.
From the Founder & Chair
I started the Institute of FAME because the people most exposed to financial risk are the least likely to have research built around their actual decisions. Most personal-finance guidance is written for people who already have a cushion — then applied, untested, to people who don't.
FAME exists to close that gap. We produce and fund peer-reviewed research and the psychometric tools behind it, and we put what we learn to work two ways — translating it into policy, and into financial education that reaches people directly. Our only test is whether the research is sound and whether it helps under-resourced consumers make better financial decisions.
That work is slow, unglamorous, and rarely funded by anyone with something to sell. That is exactly why an independent institute has to do it.
— Patrick B. Washington, PhD, Founder & Chair
