interdisciplinary

New Global Centers Program Aims to Address Challenges in Climate Change and Clean Energy

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NSF has announced a new Global Centers (GC) program, an ambitious effort to fund international, interdisciplinary collaborative research centers that will apply best practices of broadening participation and community engagement to develop use-inspired research on climate change and clean energy. Centers are also expected to create and promote opportunities for students and early career researchers to gain education and training in world class research while enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

International Partnerships

Given the global scale of the challenge of responding to climate change, NSF has partnered with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in the United Kingdom. These international partners will fund non-U.S.-based parts of teams under one of two tracks in the program.

Program Tracks

  • Track 1: Global Center Implementation will support the first Global Centers involving research partnerships with Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Awards will be up to $5 million total per award of 4-to-5-year duration. Foreign teams will be funded by their respective country agencies.Full proposals for Track 1 are due by May 10, 2023.
  • Awards will be up to $250,000 total per award of 2-year duration.The proposal window for Track 2 is between April 2, 2023 and May 10, 2023.

Opportunities to Learn More

Program Webinar

The GC program team is hosting a webinar on Tuesday February 28, 2023, 11am – 12pm EST, to introduce the new solicitation to the community and give potential PIs an opportunity to ask questions via the chat. The webinar will be recorded and eventually available on the program website for future viewing.

Webinar Zoom Link: http://bit.ly/3XXJaTi (Passcode: 114303)

“Save the Date” information can be found on the program page. 

Virtual Office Hours

The GC program team is also hosting a series of Virtual Office Hours aimed at giving potential PIs an opportunity to ask questions. The series starts on March 7 and ends on May 2. Any questions about the program can be asked at any session, although two of the sessions will have a special focus: Monday March 13 (Non-R1 Institutions) and Monday March 20 (Minority Serving Institutions).

Session dates and times can be found on the event page.

There are no restrictions on attending multiple sessions, so please feel free to attend the session which best fits your schedule. The Zoom link will be the same for all sessions.

New Opportunity: Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE)

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NSF has funded myriad research projects that resulted in publicly accessible, modifiable, and distributable open-source software, hardware, or data platforms. Now we are looking to support the development of these and other widely-used open-source products into open-source “ecosystems” (OSEs), each comprising a distributed community of developers and a broad base of users in academia, industry and government through a new program: Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE)

These OSE’s will aid in developing new technology solutions to problems of national, societal, and economic importance, such as mitigating climate change, combating biodiversity loss, feeding the planet sustainably, and limiting the spread of infectious diseases. All of which engage the biological sciences and support BIO priorities.

You can read all about POSE, including proposal requirements, deadlines, and phases, and find contact information for the cognizant Program Directors on the program page.

Opportunities to Learn More
NSF Program Directors representing the POSE program will hold an informational webinar on March 23, 2022 from 3:30 PM ET to 4:30 PM ET.

Please register for the webinar here: https://nsf.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/WN_GDUveT2ZTBG4c-tNxaODoA.

New Funding Opportunity: Predicting future pandemics to protect our health, communities, and economy

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Predicting and preventing pandemics that have not yet happened is the focus of a new funding opportunity from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Researchers from a broad range of scientific disciplines — including those across the biological sciences — are invited to submit proposals to develop multidisciplinary research centers that can address the complex challenges involved in forecasting and avoiding future pandemic-scale outbreaks.

The Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention initiative, is aimed at better understanding the dynamic nature of pathogen and disease emergence, which poses a continuing risk to our national security, health, and economic stability. The solicitation builds on a series of interdisciplinary workshops held this past year, and provides support for planning activities that identify interdisciplinary grand challenges that can only be overcome through the integration of computational, biological, engineering, and social/behavioral approaches; propose novel conceptual research and technology developments aimed at overcoming those challenges; and formulate interdisciplinary teams to conduct that work.

Phase I proposals are due on Oct. 1, 2021. A solicitation for Phase II Center Grants is expected to be released in FY 2022.

An informational webinar will be held on July 13. Visit NSF Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention webinar for log-in information.

For additional information and the full proposal solicitation, visit Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention Phase I: Development Grants (PIPP Phase I).

If you have questions, please contact the cognizant Program Officers at PIPP@nsf.gov.