Is There Life After Death? $5M Grant Will Help UC Riverside Researchers Find Out

What happens after we die? Is there an "afterlife"? Researchers at UC Riverside have been awarded a $5 million grant that will enable them to spend the next three years exploring immortality and related issues through a scientific lens.The grant, deemed "he largest grant ever awarded to a humanities professor at UC Riverside, and one of the largest given to an individual at the university," according to UCR Today, comes from the John Templeton Foundation, and has been awarded to John Martin Fischer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at UCR.

Fischer is the principal investigator in what's called The Immortality Project. The grant enables the project to move forward, and will fund both research as well as conferences and related events. The research will be done by "eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians whose work will be reviewed by respected leaders in their fields and published in academic and popular journals," as proposed to and accepted by the Project.

While there are tons of narrative and anecdotal discussion of the afterlife, including near-death experiences, Fischer says his research will be a more careful analysis of the evidence offered. "Our approach will be uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous. We’re not going to spend money to study alien-abduction reports. We will look at near-death experiences and try to find out what’s going on there — what is promising, what is nonsense, and what is scientifically debunked," said Fischer.