Academic Research Funding Strategies, LLC

In a recent Dear Colleague Letter, NSF’s GEO Directorate and its Office of International Science and Engineering announced a new Multilateral Research Funding Initiative between the Belmont Forum and the G8 Heads of Research Councils to conduct research to address issues of freshwater security and coastal vulnerability using a coupled interdisciplinary and multinational approach. The countries involved in the initiative are Australia, Brazil, Canada, France Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, the UK and the US. Funding should support researchers to cooperate in consortia consisting of partners from at least three of the participating countries and must bring together natural social scientists and research users (policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry). Where appropriate, some Partner Organizations could also support capacity building in some developing countries. NSF anticipates that 10-20 research consortia will be funded in this call at a level of approximately $150,000 to 200,000 per award per year for 2 – 3 years, pending the availability of funds. It is anticipated that awards will be made in May-June 2013. Detailed program guidelines can be found here.

Due Dates: July 20, 2012 for Pre-proposals; Dec. 20, 2012 for Full proposals.

NSF recently announced a new program entitled, "Building Community and Capacity for Data-Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and Education and Human Resources (BCC-SBE/EHR). The program will fund  workshop proposals, 2 or 3-year Research Coordination Network proposals and regular unsolicited proposals. The objective of the program is to build networks, capacity and infrastructure rather than to directly fund research, so proposals should focus on the development of communities and infrastructure within which identified research may effectively proceed rather than the conduct of research itself. Proposed projects should have significant impacts on multiple fields that include but are not limited to the SBE or EHR sciences by enabling new types of data-intensive research.  See the full program announcement here. This program is part of NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) activity.

Proposals due May 22, 2012

NOAA is soliciting proposals for competitive funding for Regional Ocean Partnerships that include National Ocean Policy (NOP) priorities including regional Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning (CMSP) efforts. The Regional Ocean Partnership Funding Program (ROPFP) will support two categories of activities:

1) Activities that contribute to achieving the priorities identified by Regional Ocean Partnerships (ROPs) while also advancing NOP priorities including the national CMSP Framework; and

2) ROP Development and Governance Support for operations and administration of existing ROPs, and for start-up costs of those regions beginning ROPs.

Eligible entities must submit to NOAA full proposals on or before April 2, 2012 in order to participate in this Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 funding opportunity. 

Proposals due April 2.

The new GeoPrisms program is the successor to the MARGINS program and will investigate the coupled geodynamics, earth surface processes, and climate interactions that build and modify continental margins over a wide range of timescales. These interactions cross the shoreline and have applications to margin evolution and dynamics, construction of stratigraphic architecture, accumulation of economic resources, and associated geologic hazards and environmental management. The GeoPRISMS Program includes two broadly integrated science initiatives (Subduction Cycles and Deformation and Rift Initiation and Evolution), linked by five overarching scientific topics and themes, where transformative advances are likely to occur in the next decade, and where a focused scientific program could be most effective. These overarching science topics include

1. Origin and evolution of continental crust;
2. Fluids, magmas and their interactions;
3. Climate-surface-tectonics feedbacks;
4. Geochemical cycles; and
5. Plate boundary deformation and geodynamics.

Each of the initiatives has identified primary sites for focused investigations, as well as thematic studies that will complement primary site studies. A separate website for this program can be found here. GeoPrsims is jointly supported by the Divisions of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

Note: This program is quite complex, with submissions allowed to various core programs as well as to special programs, so be sure to read the solicitation carefully.

Due Dates: July 2, 2012 and July 1 annually thereafter

If you're planning to submit a Major Research Instrumentation proposal to NSF in January, particulary if this is your first MRI proposal, it'll be worth your while to watch the archived recording of NSF's MRI webinar, which was held Dec. 6th. While most of the information presented in these webinars can usually be found by carefully reading the solicitation, the program directors often point out typical errors and discuss aspects that need to be emphasized in your proposal.  The slides also include some interesting statistics on funding rates by type of institution, amount, etc.

In a recent Dear Colleague Letter, NSF announces a new funding mechanism for interdisciplinary grants called CREATIV (Creative Research Awards for Transformative Interdisciplinary Ventures). This is mechanism will be offered in 2012 as a pilot trial, but NSF expects it to continue past next year, with funding increasing each year until it reaches a steady state in FY 2016. This mechanism as been developed as part of the INSPIRE (Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education) initiative. CREATIV will be similar to EAGER and RAPID mechanisms in that it is aimed at innovative ideas that might not fare well in the standard review process. To qualify for CREATIV, the project must be interdisciplinary, potentially transformative, and it must either challenge conventiona wisdom, lead to insights that enable new techniques or methodologies, or it must redefine boundaries among disciplines in science, engineering, or education. CREATIV FAQs are posted here.  A November 9th NSF webcast on CREATIV is archived here.

In a recent Dear Colleague Letter, NSF encourages research workshop proposals to identify and develop data, models and tools to inform NSF's effort to improve the way that scientists document their activities. Particularly encouraged are workshops that address:

• Advancing scientific communication both nationally and internationally by: fostering the replication of scientific research, ensuring  attribution for the intellectual contributions of researchers, enabling the location and identification of collaborators across disciplines, and developing platforms that facilitate the reporting and dissemination of scholarly activities and outputs.
• Advancing the measurement of scientific activity both nationally and internationally by: identifying sources of information about researchers' productivity and impact, and
  developing ways in which researchers' scientific activity can be automatically captured and validated.

 It's important to note that these kinds of workshops often help inform future funding opportunities at NSF, and organizing such a workshop can give researchers significant input and insight into NSF's goals for future funding in the area, which can be extremely helpful in competing for funding.

In years past, NSF emphatically enforced a dividing line between what it would fund and what NIH funds, and any proposals that involved human disease were returned without review. That attitude has changed markedly in recent as it's become more apparent that engineers and physical scientists can make transformative contributions to a number of biomedical and human health-related fields. Three recently announced programs continue that trend:

• Physical and Engineering Sciences in Oncology (PESO) - funded by the Directorate for Engineering and the Division of Materials Research within the Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences, this program teams with the Office of Physical Sciences-Oncology of the National Cancer Institute to fund investigator-intiated proposals related to the application of physical and engineering sciences knowledge towards understanding cancer diseases - due Feb. 15, 2012
• Advancing Health Services through System Modeling Research - this program (which grew out of a 2009 workshop and is administered by CMMI) is funded in partnership with the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) and funds investigator-initiated proposals to foster new collaborations among health services researcher and industrial and systems engin eers, with a specific emphasis on the supportive role of health IT.  Submission window: Jan 15, 2012 - Feb. 15, 2012
• Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB) - This crosscutting program aims to address fundamental technical and scientific issues that would support transformation of healthcare from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive, proactive, evidence-based, person-centered and focused on wellbeing rather than disease. The issues to be addressed include, but are not limited to, sensor technology, networking, information and machine learning technology, modeling cognitive processes, system and process modeling, and social and economic issues. Effective technology-based solutions must satisfy a multitude of constraints arising from clinical needs, social interactions, cognitive limitations, barriers to behavioral changes, heterogeneity of data, semantic mismatch and limitations of current cyberphysical systems. Type 1 (exploratory) propopals due Feb. 6, 2012; Type II (integrative) proposals due Feb. 21, 2012.
  

Plant Feedstock Genomics for Bio Energy: A Joint Research Solicitation with DOE - supports genomics-based research that will lead to the improved use of biomass and plant feed stocks for the production of fuels such as ethanol or renewable chemical feedstocks. Please note that applicants will submit applications through DOE and a preapplication is requested rather than a letter of intent. LOI due Dec. 16, 2011; Proposal due Feb. 24, 2012.

The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) has recently issued the following new RFAs (note that the FDA does not follow NIH’s page limitation guidelines or scoring criteria).

• Predictive Lung Deposition Models for Safety and Efficacy of Orally Inhaled Drug Products (U01) – This RFA will fund research to to develop a computational fluid dynamics model of orally inhaled drug products that can account for drug product characteristics (aerodynamic particle size distribution, APSD) and physiological parameters (breathing pattern and airway geometry) on total and regional deposition in the lungs. The results obtained in this study will be used in developing a linked CFD-compartment model that can predict the effects of lung deposition on safety (systemic exposure) and efficacy (local delivery) for locally acting orally inhaled drugs.
• Effect of Physicochemical Properties of Ophthalmic Formulations on Ocular Bioavailability (U01) – will fund research to study the effect of various physicochemical properties of ophthalmic suspensions and emulsions on ocular bioavailability.  Formulations having the same active and inactive ingredients in the same concentrations may still exhibit differences in physicochemical properties due to differences in the manufacturing process.  Key physicochemical properties which impact clearance, distribution, and drug release will be investigated.

For a full list of recently-released funding opportunities, see the links listed under "Compilations of Funding Announcements on our Finding Funding page.