Featured Opportunities

November 13, 2024

• TheSwine Health Information Center (SHIC) has partnered with the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and the Pork Checkoff to fund a $4 million research program to enhance prevention, preparedness, mitigation and response capabilities for H5N1 influenza in the U.S. swine herd. SHIC/FFAR/NPB are inviting proposal submissions from qualified researchers for funding consideration to address H5N1 Risk to Swine Research Program priorities described in the detailed Request for Research Proposals (RFP) on the SHIC website. Collaborative projects that include the pork industry, allied industry, dairy or poultry industries, academic institutions and/or public/private partnerships are highly encouraged. Projects that demonstrate the most urgent and timeliness of completion, provide the greatest value to pork producers, and show efficient use of funds will be prioritized for funding. Projects are requested to be completed within a 12–18-month period with sufficient justification required for extended project duration. Priority Research areas include: Vaccines, Clinical Presentation, Mammary Transmission, Surveillance, Introduction Risks, Caretakers, Biosecurity, Pork Safety, Production impact, and Pig Movements.
• BASF, Amazon, and Pregis are working together to catalyze industry-wide demand for circular packaging materials (e.g., renewable, recyclable, biodegradable) as an alternative to conventional plastics. BASF brings its expertise in polymer and dispersion chemistry, enabling the development of advanced materials. Sustainable packaging alternatives currently on the market (e.g., biopolyester materials) do not perform as well as conventional plastics in many applications and have faced a cost barrier to broad adoption. They aim to find solutions which address current food packaging performance issues, mainly moisture barrier and mechanical properties such as puncture resistance, tear resistance, and tensile strength. They are interested in material solutions for food packaging applications, including snack food packaging, frozen food packaging, and bagged produce packaging. They are also interested in solutions for produce bags, outbound product packaging, and polybag replacements. We are interested in biodegradable materials that can be used in barrier layers, adhesives, and additives to provide a moisture barrier and mechanical properties required by the intended packaging applications. This could include biopolyesters that may also perform as stand-alone films. The ideal materials are biodegradable and/or compatible with existing recycling streams. They are seeking solutions that address the high cost and performance challenges of biopolyesters currently on the market. This may include alternatives to polyethylene such as PHA, seaweed-based materials, or cellulose films.
• The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Geosciences Open Science Ecosystem (GEO OSE) program seeks to realize the benefits of open science practices toward advancing research and education in the geosciences. To achieve this vision, the GEO OSE program encourages efforts to foster adoption of open, inclusive, and equitable scientific practices across geoscience domains. The program supports development of innovative open science approaches that advance geosciences research and education through leveraging expanding information resources and computing capabilities. The program also supports initiatives to strengthen the capacity of current and future geoscientists to access, utilize, and collaborate within the growing ecosystem of open science resources. GEO OSE projects may pursue a variety of activities to advance open science practices within the geosciences. This includes community/cohort building around defining a shared vision for open science and adopting open science practices within and across geoscience domains. It also includes development and implementation of open science approaches that accelerate geoscience research discovery via seamless workflows connecting data, software, physical collections, and computing. In addition, GEO OSE supports educational activities that instill open science practices and broaden adoption of cyberinfrastructure resources to reduce barriers to geoscience research and education.
• NSF’s Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences program supports basic scientific research about the nature, causes, consequences, or evolution of the spatial dimensions of human behaviors, activities, and dynamics as well as their interactions with environmental and social processes across a range of scales. Contemporary geographical research encompasses diverse research traditions and methodologies. Recognizing the breadth of the field’s contributions to science, the HEGS Program welcomes proposals for empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, methodologically rigorous, and generalizable research that advances geographical and geospatial sciences. Because the National Science Foundation's mandate is to support fundamental scientific research, the HEGS program cannot fund research that takes as its primary goal humanistic interpretations or findings that are not generalizable or reproducible. HEGS welcomes proposals that utilize quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods in novel ways. However, a proposal that applies geographical or geospatial methods to a geographic problem without proposing how that problem provides an opportunity to make a theory-testing or theory-expanding contribution to geographical science, broadly defined, will be returned without review. HEGS supported projects are expected to yield results that will enhance, expand, and transform fundamental geographical theory and geospatial methods and that will have broader impacts that benefit society.
• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) 2025 Human Exploration Research Opportunities (HERO) seeks applied research in support of NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP). The research will fall into one or more categories corresponding to the HRP’s five Elements: Space Radiation; Human Health Countermeasures; Exploration Medical Capability; Human Factors and Behavioral Performance; and Research Operations and Integration. This is an umbrella Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) which explains the basic goals and requirements for HERO funding. Details of solicited research opportunities, including topics and proposal due dates, are provided in appendices to this NOFO, one of which—Appendix A—was also published this week.
• NSF’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) seeks to foster the design, discovery, and development of materials to accelerate their path to deployment by harnessing the power of data and computational tools in concert with experiment and theory. DMREF emphasizes a deep integration of experiments, computation, and theory; the use of accessible digital data across the materials development continuum; and strengthening connections among theorists, computational scientists, data scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and experimentalists as well as those from academia, industry, and government. DMREF is the principal NSF program responsive to the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC’s) Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Subcommittee on the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI). Over its inaugural decade, the MGI has driven a transformational paradigm shift in the philosophy of how materials research is performed. DMREF is supportive of the 2021 MGI Strategic Planand its three primary goals, e., unifying the materials innovation infrastructure; harnessing the power of materials data; and educating, training, and connecting a world-class materials R&D workforce. DMREF will accordingly support activities that significantly accelerate the materials discovery-to-use timeline by building the fundamental knowledge base needed to advance the design, development, or manufacturability of materials with desirable properties or functionality. This is a limited submission opportunity. If you are interested in submitting to this program, you must notify the Office of Research Development by December 2, 2024 via ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu.
• The Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science (SC) program in Biological and Environmental Research (BER) announces its interest in receiving applications for research in Environmental System Science (ESS). The goal of the ESS program in BER is to advance an integrated, robust, and scale-aware predictive understanding of terrestrial systems and their interdependent microbial, biogeochemical, ecological, hydrological, and physical processes. The ESS program scope advances foundational process knowledge with an emphasis on understudied ecosystems. This NOFO will consider applications that focus on measurements, experiments, field data, modeling, and synthesis to provide improved understanding and representation of ecosystems and watersheds in ways that advance the sophistication and capabilities of models that span from individual processes to Earth-system scales. This NOFO will encompass three Science Research Areas: 1) plant-soilmicrobe interactions and their influence on belowground biogeochemical processes; 2) synthesis studies using existing data that address testing of ESS-relevant hypotheses and development of transferable insights into knowledge gaps for U.S. southeast coastal systems; and 3) synthesis studies on contributions and vulnerabilities of Earth system processes in marginal and degraded lands.
• The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s Bioengineering Partnerships with Industry (U01) solicits applications from research partnerships formed by academic and industrial investigators to accelerate the development and adoption of promising bioengineering tools and technologies that can address important biomedical problems. The objectives are to establish these tools and technologies as robust, well-characterized solutions that fulfill an unmet need and are capable of enhancing our understanding of life science processes or the practice of medicine. Awards will focus on supporting multidisciplinary teams that apply an integrative, quantitative bioengineering approach to developing technologies. The goal of the program is to support technological innovations that deliver new capabilities which can realize meaningful solutions within 5 – 10 years.
• NSF’s Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering program supports fundamental engineering research that will improve the quality of life of persons with disabilities through the development of new theories, methodologies, technologies, or devices. Disabilities could be developmental, cognitive, hearing, mobility, visual, selfcare, independent living, or other. Proposed projects must advance knowledge regarding a specific human disability or pathological motion or understanding of injury mechanisms. Research may be supported that is directed toward the characterization, restoration, rehabilitation, and/or substitution of human functional ability or cognition, or to the interaction between persons with disabilities and their environment. Areas of particular interest are neuroengineering, rehabilitation robotics, brain-inspired assistive or rehabilitative systems, theoretical or computational methods, and novel models of functional recovery including the development and application of artificial physiological systems.
• HHS, NIH’s Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Interdisciplinary Research Units (CARBIRUs) program supports multidisciplinary, collaborative research programs focused on improving our understanding of bacterial and host factors important for antibiotic resistance and infection by bacterial pathogens for which antibiotic resistance is a known public health concern to inform new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat antibiotic-resistant infections. Each Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Interdisciplinary Research Unit (CARBIRU) is expected to bring together investigators from different disciplines in a cohesive and synergistic team to conduct research to address key knowledge gaps that hinder development of effective treatment and prevention strategies. It is expected that each CARBIRU will conduct highly innovative and synergistic research activities centered on a unifying theme or set of hypotheses to address important gaps in our current knowledge. The CARBIRU program is intended to support fundamental, collaborative research ranging from discovery to early development research activities with potential to uncover novel approaches to combat antibiotic-resistant infections. The CARBIRU program is not intended to support preclinical development of already well-characterized lead countermeasure candidates because these activities are supported by other National Institute Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) programs. NIAID anticipates considerable variety among the proposed program themes and objectives. It’s envisioned that themes could include, but are not limited to: 1) Identification of novel strategies to prevent, diagnose, or treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections; 2) Elucidation of mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and strategies to prevent the emergence of resistance; 3) Understanding antibiotic treatment failure, including the contribution of non-traditional mechanisms of resistance ; and 4) Understanding the role of the microbiome and antibiotic-mediated dysbiosis in the development of resistant bacterial infections.
• NSF’s Emerging Mathematics in Biology (eMB) program seeks to stimulate the development of innovative mathematical theories, techniques, and approaches to investigate challenging questions of great interest to biologists and public health policymakers. It supports truly integrative research projects in mathematical biology that address challenging and significant biological questions through novel applications of traditional, but nontrivial, mathematical tools and methods or the development of new mathematical theories particularly from foundational mathematics, including the mathematical foundation of Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning/Machine Learning (AI/DL/ML) enabling explainable AI or mechanistic insight. The program emphasizes the uses of mathematical methodologies to advance our understanding of complex, dynamic, and heterogenous biological systems at all scales (molecular, cellular, organismal, population, ecosystems, evolutionary, etc.).