Featured Opportunities

May 15, 2024

• • • The Department of Agriculture (USDA), OPPE’s Outreach and Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers program solicits applications from community-based and non-profit organizations, institutions of higher education, and Tribal entities. The overall goal of this Program is to encourage and assist underserved farmers and ranchers, military veteran farmers and ranchers, and beginning farmers and ranchers with owning and operating farms and ranches and in participating equitably in the full range of agricultural, forestry, and related programs offered by USDA. It also includes projects that develop underserved youths' interest in agriculture. In partnership with the OPPE, eligible entities may compete for funding on projects that provide education and training in agriculture, agribusiness, forestry, agricultural-related services, and USDA programs, and to conduct outreach initiatives designed to accomplish those goals. This partnership includes working closely with OPPE, attend OPPE-led events in your proposed service territory, and collaborate with USDA Service Centers located in your state (Farm Service Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Rural Development).
    • The National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) Graduate Education in the Humanities: A National Convening will support the design, development, and implementation of a national convening on the state of, and prospects for, higher education in the humanities. Under the direction of a steering committee and related working groups, the national convening will provide participants the opportunity to explore current challenges and share best practices; offer guidance for graduate programs, departments, and other interested stakeholders; and help develop a strategic vision for graduate education in the humanities. In addition, the recipient will publish and disseminate a report based on the findings of the steering committee, working groups, and national convening. The cooperative agreement will be awarded with federal matching funds. The recipient will be required to match the NEH financial contribution by raising an equivalent amount from third-party, non-federal sources. This is a limited submission with notification (working title, team list, 2-3 sentence synopsis) due to the Office of Research Development by 5 pm on May 30,2024 via ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu.
    • NEH’s Public Humanities Projects program supports projects that bring the ideas of the humanities to life for general audiences through public programming. Projects must engage humanities scholarship to analyze significant themes in disciplines such as history, literature, ethics, and art history. Awards support projects that are intended to reach broad and diverse public audiences in non-classroom settings in the United States. Projects should engage with ideas that are accessible to the general public and employ appealing interpretive formats. Public Humanities Projects supports projects in three categories (Exhibitions, Historic Places, and Humanities Discussions), and at two funding levels (Planning and Implementation). Proposed projects may include complementary components: for example, a museum exhibition might be accompanied by a website or mobile app. Projects may be international, national, regional, or local in focus and should reach a broad public audience. We welcome projects tailored to particular groups, such as families, youth (including K-12 students in informal educational settings), underserved communities, and veterans.
    • The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Molecular Foundations for Sustainability: Sustainable Polymers Enabled by Emerging Data Analytics program (MFS-SPEED) is a cross-directorate funding call in response to The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. It is supported by the NSF Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP), and five industry partners: Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, BASF, Dow, and IBM. The goal of MFS-SPEED is to support fundamental research enabling the accelerated discovery and ultimate manufacturing of sustainable polymers using state-of-the-art data science, and to enhance development of a cross-disciplinary workforce skilled in this area. In particular, through this solicitation the research community is encouraged to address the discovery and elaboration of new sustainable polymers or sustainable pathways to existing polymers by the creation and use of a data-centric environment where research projects are: (1) focused on new approaches to predicting structure and properties of polymers and advanced soft materials; (2) with insights enabled by data analytics including Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning; (3)this includes more efficient, scalable preparation of monomers and polymers using existing or new synthetic routes; and (4) this call aims to train a technical workforce that leverages data analytics to create sustainable polymers and soft materials.
    • The Department of Energy, Office of Science (SC) program in High Energy Physics (HEP) hereby announces its interest in receiving interdisciplinary applications for open scientific research on Quantum Information Science (QIS) Enabled Discovery (QuantISED) to further the HEP mission to understand how the universe works at its most fundamental level [1]. Successful applications will help define an exploratory program where innovative solutions for scientific discovery are developed and deployed to advance HEP science drivers and contribute to QIS research and technology for public benefit. The main topics to be investigated are: research in QIS theory and quantum sensing that extends the scientific reach of existing HEP programs well beyond what is currently achievable and enables new lines of inquiry; using quantum theory to improve the understanding of capabilities and limitations of fundamental QIS; and developing pathfinding experiments that demonstrate the full potential of state-of-the-art quantum sensing as a powerful tool to enable new discoveries when scaled from proof of concept to essential scientific instrumentation. This is a limited submission opportunity; thus, if you are interested in submitting, you must first notify (working title, team list, 2-3 sentence synopsis) the Office of Research Development via ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu of your desire to submit.
    • The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have a mutual interest in innovative research on quantum technologies that can advance biomedical science. This shared interest aligns with the National Quantum Initiative as described in the National Science and Technology Council's strategy on Bringing Quantum Sensors to Fruition (https://www.quantum.gov/wp-content/uploads/ 2022/03/BringingQuantumSensorstoFruition.pdf). In particular, the NSF Directorate for Engineering (ENG), the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO), and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the NIH are collaborating to promote the advancement of quantum sensors for biomedical research in clinical settings. NSF’s Dear Colleague Letter (DCL): NSF-NIH Pathfinder Supplements on Quantum Sensors for Biomedical Science announces an opportunity for researchers currently supported by NSF to request supplemental funding to extend their research on quantum sensing in a direction that may be of joint interest to NSF and NIH. Following consultation with a cognizant NSF program officer, supplemental funding may be requested to support postdoctoral fellows or graduate research associates to perform research that integrates developers of new quantum technologies with potential end-users for the anticipated sensors and devices. Priority will be given to supplemental funding requests that identify meaningful research collaborations that connect current NSF-funded teams with researchers in biomedical or clinical research settings. Joint efforts on research, development, and demonstration of quantum sensing and imaging tools, or other instantiations of quantum technology are sought.
    • The $125,000 Science Synthesis Prize: Identifying Key Barriers to Renewable Integration, launched by the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Electricity (OE), aims to expand the renewable energy research community and catalyze transdisciplinary scholarship and practice. OE invites students, researchers, industry partners, and key stakeholders to thoroughly analyze the landscape of the renewable energy integration theory and highlight pivotal opportunities and areas of investment that address integration challenges. Competitors will form robust teams to develop an in-depth and cohesive research paper that highlights state-of-the-art renewable technologies, addresses the current and projected challenges associated with such technologies, and identifies the renewable integration gaps present throughout the industry that could be addressed with greater investment, research, development and/or awareness.
    • Scientific Disruption is developing technology to enable fundamentally new ways to design and employ integrated circuits for the next generations of microsystems. While Moore’s Law has shown remarkable resilience to the constant predictions of electronic transistor scaling’s death over the past decade, quantum physics and Heisenberg uncertainty may prove to be an ultimate limit over the next decade. Thus, the Department of Defense, Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) is explicitly soliciting research topics, through its Office-wide Broad Agency Announcement, that may lead to the development and proliferation of the next transistor technology and the required building blocks and manufacturing ecosystem around it. By identifying and cultivating multiple candidates, a step change to a new scaling trajectory and the microsystem dominance that comes with it may be possible. Three specific Scientific Disruption candidates, and the resulting new classes of circuits, are of interest: photonic circuits, quantum circuits, and bio/organic circuits.
    • NSF’s Correctness for Scientific Computing Systems (CS²) is a joint program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). The program addresses challenges that are both core to DOE’s mission and essential to NSF’s mission of ensuring broad scientific progress. The program’s overarching goal is to elevate correctness as a fundamental requirement for scientific computing tools and tool chains, spanning low-level libraries through complex multi-physics simulations and emerging scientific workflows. The CS2 program puts correctness on an equal footing with performance, the focus of current scientific computing research. This program envisions the necessity of proving correctness even in performant scientific computing systems. Such correctness proofs themselves might rely upon multiple factors, including correctness of static and runtime program analyses. CS2 requires close and continuous collaboration between researchers in two complementary areas of expertise. One area is scientific computing, which, for this solicitation, is broadly construed to include: models and simulations of scientific theories; management and analysis of data from scientific simulations, observations, and experiments; libraries for numerical computation; and allied topics. The second area is formal reasoning and mechanized proving of properties of programs, which, for this solicitation, is broadly construed to include automatic/interactive/auto-active verification, runtime verification, type systems, abstract interpretation, programming languages, program analysis, program logic, compilers, concurrency, stochastic reasoning, static and dynamic testing, property-based testing, and allied topics.
    • The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division (CORVD) will jointly support innovative research in modeling policy options for evolving public health challenges via the Dear Colleague Letter: Mathematical Modeling of Policy Options for Evolving Public Health Challenges (MPOPHC). Mathematical modeling can further the public welfare and national security in many ways, notable among them by increasing understanding of biological phenomena and elucidating matters affecting the success of public health measures to prevent or mitigate infectious diseases. The CDC also has an interest in promoting research to strengthen modeling for the prevention and control, through immunization, of disease, disability and death. This Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) encourages the submission of research projects aimed at mathematical modeling of the transmission of respiratory pathogens among human hosts, the most likely cause of future pandemics, with a focus on policy options for evolving public health challenges. This joint activity will provide support to multidisciplinary teams that work on increasing the quality of mechanistic models capable of evaluating the merits of alternative policies for mitigating public health threats. Proposers are encouraged to explore a wide range of innovations that address various aspects of this challenge and to use different modeling techniques.
    • The Smith Richardson Foundation sponsors an annual Strategy and Policy Fellows grant competition to support young scholars and policy thinkers on American foreign policy, international relations, international security, military policy, and diplomatic and military history. The purpose of the program is to strengthen the U.S. community of scholars and researchers conducting policy analysis in these fields. The Foundation will award at least three research grants of $60,000 each to enable the recipients to research and write a book. Within the academic community, this program supports junior or adjunct faculty, research associates, and post-docs who are engaged in policy-relevant research and writing. Within the think tank community, the program supports members of the rising generation of policy thinkers who are focused on U.S. strategic and foreign policy issues.