Featured Opportunities

January 15, 2025

• The Department of Agriculture, Rural Development’s Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT) Grant Program is specifically designed to assist rural communities in acquiring distance learning and telemedical technologies so that local teachers and medical service providers who serve rural residents can link to other teachers, medical professionals, and experts located at distances too far to access otherwise. Since 1994, the DLT Grant Program has helped to establish hundreds of distance learning and telemedicine systems improving quality of life for thousands of residents in rural communities across the United States.
• The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP) supports genome-scale research that addresses challenging questions of biological, societal and economic importance. PGRP encourages the development of innovative tools, technologies, and resources that empower a broad plant research community to answer scientific questions on a genome-wide scale. Emphasis is placed on the scale and depth of the question being addressed and the creativity of the approach. Data produced by plant genomics should be usable, accessible, integrated across scales, and of high impact across biology. Training, broadening participation, and career development are essential to scientific progress and should be integrated in all PGRP-funded projects.
• The Dirksen Congressional Center invites applications for grants to fund research on congressional leadership and the U.S. Congress. The Center, named for the late Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, is a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to the study of Congress. Since 1978, the Congressional Research Grants program has invested more than $1,250,000 to support over 500 projects. The competition is open to individuals with a serious interest in studying Congress. Political scientists, historians, biographers, scholars of public administration or American studies, independent researchers, and journalists are among those eligible. The Center encourages graduate students who have successfully defended their dissertation prospectus to apply. Applicants must be U.S. citizens who reside in the United States.
• The Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (FRA) Fellowship Program provides grants to colleges and universities to fund fellowships for faculty members seeking to improve their area studies and foreign language skills by conducting research abroad. The program is designed to contribute to the development and improvement of the study of modern foreign languages and area studies in the United States
• NSF’s Incorporating Human Behavior in Epidemiological Models (IHBEM) program supports research that incorporates research on social and behavioral processes in mathematical epidemiological models. The program provides support for projects that involve balanced participation from the mathematical sciences and from the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. The purpose of the IHBEM is to support interdisciplinary collaborations that integrate research on behavioral and/or social processes in mathematical epidemiological models. Projects supported under this activity should be collaborative in nature and depend for their advancement on the coordinated interaction of two or more PIs/co-PIs, with balanced participation from both the mathematical sciences and the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Additional participants from other disciplines, especially the biological sciences, are also welcome.
• The Department of Energy (DOE), EERE’s Solar Module and Solar Hardware (SMASH) Incubator seeks to address the lack of sufficient private investment that is available to successfully commercialize the output of research, development, and demonstration activities and bring innovative solar photovoltaic (PV) technology to market. Specifically, projects funded through this NOFO will encourage innovations in solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing across the supply chain, with the aim of reducing U.S. reliance on imported materials and technologies. This NOFO also encourages the development of new solar hardware and technology for domestic use and potential export. These activities are expected to deliver jobs and economic growth in the clean energy sector, while increasing national energy security. Topic Area 1 seeks to conduct early-stage pilot-scale testing and demonstration of innovative processes or products that can substantively increase domestic manufacturing in all segments of the crystalline silicon solar module supply chain. Each segment also includes the manufacturing equipment used in that segment, input materials for that segment, process control and characterization tools, and consumables used in that segment, which today are predominantly made outside the United States. Topic Area 2 aims to support the cadmium telluride (CdTe) PV industry, an increasingly valuable part of the U.S. economy and leading domestic renewable energy technology. All segments of the CdTe PV module supply chain are of interest, including improvements in materials, processes, manufacturing, components, metrology, demonstration, recycling, and reclamation. Topic Area 3 is focused on R&D and demonstration activities with the goal of de-risking new non-module PV components and manufacturing processes, while developing and validating a realistic pathway to commercial success. This includes structural and electrical components and tools that can be made domestically and improve performance, functionality, reliability, or ease of installation for PV systems.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, NIH Trailblazer Award (R21) is an opportunity for NIH-defined New and Early Stage Investigators (https://grants.nih.gov/policy/early-investigators/index.htm) to pursue research programs that integrate engineering and the physical sciences with the life and/or biomedical sciences. A Trailblazer project may be exploratory, developmental, proof of concept, or high risk-high impact, and may be technology design-directed, discovery-driven, or hypothesis-driven. Importantly, applicants must propose research approaches for which there are minimal or no preliminary data. A distinct feature for this NOFO is that no preliminary data are required, expected, or encouraged. However, if available, minimal preliminary data are allowed. Preliminary data are defined as material which the applicant has independently produced and not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal. All preliminary data should be clearly marked and limited to one-half page, which may include one figure. Applications including data more than one-half page or more than one figure will be considered noncompliant with the NOFO instructions and will not go forward to review.
• NSF’s Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes are large-scale interdisciplinary research projects motivated by major challenges at the frontiers of quantum information science and technology (QIST). Institutes are expected to catalyze breakthroughs on important problems underpinning QIST, for example in the focus areas of quantum computation, quantum communication, quantum simulation and/or quantum sensing. Successful institutes will coordinate a variety of approaches to specific scientific, technological, and educational goals in these fields, including multiple institutions and building upon multiple disciplines, as motivated by the science and engineering challenges. In so doing, Institutes will nurture a culture of discovery, provide education, training, and workforce development opportunities in the context of cutting-edge research, and demonstrate value-added from synergistic coordination within the institute and with the broader community. Partnerships, infrastructure, industry engagement, outreach, international collaboration, and new applications for QIST should be fostered by Institutes in support of their research, education, and coordination goals. This is a limited submission program. If you are interested in applying, you must first contact the Office of Research Development via ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu.
• NSF’s Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable Open Science (FAIROS) program seeks to support a broad range of transformative open science activities including but not limited to i.) Research, education, and socio-technical cyberinfrastructure development capacities that advance sustainable multi-disciplinary findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) research data management (RDM) and open science capabilities, ii.) Piloting new models of scientific communication and publication that improve efficiency and accessibility, iii.) Developing FAIROS data portals, research data commons, RDM as a national service, and iv.) Lowering barriers to accessing, curating, integrating, linking, managing, sharing, and storing data across many disciplinary domains, irrespective of data size. The program supports innovation across the cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem to address accessibility, data curation, research data management, discoverability, reliability, reproducibility, preservation, sustainability, and utility of research products, including data software, and code, developed as part of funded projects.
• Through the Enabling Discovery through GEnomics (EDGE) program, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes for Health (NIH) support research to advance understanding of comparative and functional genomics. The EDGE program supports the development of innovative tools, technologies, resources, and infrastructure that advance biological research focused on the identification of the causal mechanisms connecting genes and phenotypes. The EDGE program also supports functional genomic research that addresses the mechanistic basis of complex traits in diverse organisms within the context (environmental, developmental, social, and/or genomic) in which they function. These goals are essential to uncovering the rules that underlie genomes-to-phenomes relationships and predict phenotype, an area relevant to Understanding the Rules of Life: Predicting Phenotype, one of the 10 Big Ideas for NSF investment. The goals also support the NHGRI priority to establish the roles and relationships of all genes and regulatory elements in pathways, networks, and phenotypes.
• NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) Core supports research and training on evolutionary and ecological processes acting at the level of populations, species, communities, ecosystems, macrosystems, and biogeographic extents. DEB encourages research that elucidates fundamental principles that identify and explain the unity and diversity of life and its interactions with the environment over space and time. Research may incorporate field, laboratory, or collection-based approaches; observational or manipulative studies; synthesis activities; phylogenetic discovery projects; or theoretical approaches involving analytical, statistical, or computational modeling. Proposals should be submitted to the core clusters (Ecosystem Science, Evolutionary Processes, Population and Community Ecology, and Systematics and Biodiversity Science). DEB also encourages interdisciplinary proposals that cross conceptual boundaries and integrate over levels of biological organization or across multiple spatial and temporal scales.
• The Department of Defense, Department of the Navy (DoN) Y25 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education and Workforce Program invites a wide range of applications aimed at enhancing existing solutions or developing innovative approaches to maintain and cultivate a world-class Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce. This workforce is essential for preserving the technological superiority of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The proposed projects should focus on creating, enhancing, or sustaining educational pathways and workforce opportunities in STEM fields for U.S. citizens, particularly in areas relevant to Department of the Navy (DON) science and technology. The Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) encourages initiatives that strengthen the capacity of educational systems and local communities to provide impactful STEM learning experiences for students of all ages, as well as for the naval-related workforce.
• Biology has transformed science over the last century through discoveries that cross subdisciplines from the molecular to the organismal to the ecosystem level. While making great progress, biology has also slowly fragmented into subdisciplines, creating a dynamic tension between unifying principles and increasingly reductionist pursuits. The aim of NSF’s Biology Integration Institutes is to bring researchers together around the common goal of understanding how the processes that sustain life and enable biological innovation operate and interact within and across different scales of organization, from molecules to cells, tissues to organisms, species, ecosystems, biomes and the entire Earth. The Biology Integration Institutes (BII) program supports collaborative teams of researchers investigating questions that span multiple disciplines within and beyond biology. Biology Integration Institutes will focus on biological themes that enable the discoveries of life’s innovations. The outcomes from biological integration will inspire new biotechnologies and applications to drive our bioeconomy and provide solutions to societal challenges. While this solicitation focuses on the integration of biological subdisciplines, any field beyond biology may be included as needed to address the overarching biological theme.
• The Department of Justice, NIJ’s FY25 Research on the Abuse, Neglect, and Financial Exploitation of Older Adults seeks to fund applications for rigorous research and evaluation projects in four topical areas: (1) evaluation of programs that seek to prevent, intervene in, or respond to the abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation of older adults; (2) research on financial fraud against older adults, including knowledge building around scam prevention messaging; (3) research on formal and informal caregivers who abuse (either financially, physically, sexually, and/or emotionally) or neglect older adults, to inform intervention and prevention program development; and (4) forensic research involving the development of radiographic evidence and bioinformatic approaches relevant to the physical abuse of older adults.
• The Department of Justice, NIJ’s FY25 Graduate Research Fellowship program seeks to support doctoral students whose dissertation research is relevant to preventing and controlling crime, advancing knowledge of victimization and effective victim services, or ensuring the fair and impartial administration of criminal or juvenile justice in the United States. This furthers the DOJ mission by increasing the pool of researchers who are engaged in providing science-based solutions to problems relevant to criminal and juvenile justice policy and practice in the United States.
• The Department of Justice, NIJ’s FY25 Research and Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence for Criminal Justice Purposes program seeks to support research and evaluation that advances the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the criminal justice system. The goal is to improve the fairness, accuracy, and effectiveness of criminal justice processes through AI applications in crime prevention, public safety, and justice system decision-making. Research should explore both the benefits and limitations of AI, addressing potential risks and downstream impacts. Emphasis is placed on transparency, accountability, and civil rights protections.