Project Description: The NSF Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems (ECCS) supports enabling and transformative research at the nano, micro, and macro scales that fuels progress in engineering system applications with high societal impacts.

ECCS programs encompass novel electronic, photonic, and magnetic devices — and the integration of these devices into circuit and system environments, intelligent systems, control, and networks — for applications spanning communications and cyber technologies, energy and power, healthcare, environment, transportation, manufacturing, and other systems-related areas.

ECCS strongly emphasizes the integration of education into its research programs to ensure the preparation of a diverse and professionally skilled workforce. ECCS also strengthens its programs through links to other areas of engineering, science, industry, government, and international collaborations.

Division Programs

The Division has three program clusters, managed by teams of program directors, that reflect the increasing convergence of traditional disciplinary topics and the need for interdisciplinary approaches to emerging technological challenges.

• Electronics, Photonics and Magnetic Devices (EPMD)
• Communications, Circuits, and Sensing-Systems (CCSS)
• Energy, Power, Control and Networks (EPCN) (formerly EPAS)

Project Description: The SBIR program is congressionally mandated and intended to support scientific excellence and technological innovation through the investment of federal research funds to build a strong national economy by stimulating technological innovation in the private sector; strengthening the role of small business in meeting federal research and development needs; increasing the commercial application of federally supported research results; and fostering and encouraging participation by socially and economically disadvantaged and women-owned small businesses.

Project Description: The National Science Foundation’s Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program provides small businesses with equity-free funding to conduct research and development (R&D) work and de-risk technology for commercial success. The NSF STTR program accepts innovative proposals that show promise of commercial and societal impact in almost all areas of technology. STTR Phase I proposals are expected to undertake R&D with the aim of establishing technical feasibility or proof of concept. Successful applicants will receive a grant of up to $225,000 over a period of 6 to 12 months (the period to be decided by the company). Successful STTR proposers will receive funding about 6 months after the solicitation deadline. Companies that receive a Phase I award are eligible to apply for a Phase II award (award amount up to $750,000; duration 2 years). STTR Program Directors host webinars in the weeks leading to the proposal deadline. Further information about the program, including the webinar schedule, short videos and Q&A, is also available at www.nsf.gov/SBIR.

Project Description: Incorporated in 1985, the Conservation, Food and Health Foundation seeks to promote the conservation of natural resources, improve the production and distribution of food, and improve health in the developing world. The foundation helps build capacity within developing countries in its three areas of interest with grants that support research or projects that solve specific problems.

The foundation supports projects that demonstrate strong local leadership, promote professional development in the conservation, agricultural, and health sciences; develop the capacity of local organizations; and address a particular problem in the field. It prefers to support projects addressing under-funded issues and geographic areas.

Project Description: The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) hold much promise as sectors of the economy where we can expect to see continuous vigorous growth in the coming decades. STEM job creation is expected to outpace non-STEM job creation significantly, according to the Commerce Department, reflecting the importance of STEM knowledge to the US economy.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) plays a leadership role in developing and implementing efforts to enhance and improve STEM education in the United States. Through NSF's Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) initiative, the agency continues to make a substantial commitment to the highest caliber undergraduate STEM education through a Foundation-wide framework of investments. The IUSE: EHR is a core NSF STEM education program that seeks to promote novel, creative, and transformative approaches to generating and using new knowledge about STEM teaching and learning to improve STEM education for undergraduate students. The program is open to application from all institutions of higher education and associated organizations. NSF places high value on educating students to be leaders and innovators in emerging and rapidly changing STEM fields as well as educating a scientifically literate public. In pursuit of this goal, IUSE: EHR supports projects that seek to bring recent advances in STEM knowledge into undergraduate education, that adapt, improve, and incorporate evidence-based practices into STEM teaching and learning, and that lay the groundwork for institutional improvement in STEM education. In addition to innovative work at the frontier of STEM education, this program also encourages replication of research studies at different types of institutions and with different student bodies to produce deeper knowledge about the effectiveness and transferability of findings.

IUSE: EHR also seeks to support projects that have high potential for broader societal impacts, including improved diversity of students and instructors participating in STEM education, professional development for instructors to ensure adoption of new and effective pedagogical techniques that meet the changing needs of students, and projects that promote institutional partnerships for collaborative research and development. IUSE: EHR especially welcomes proposals that will pair well with the efforts of NSF INCLUDES (https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsfincludes/index.jsp) to develop STEM talent from all sectors and groups in our society.

For all the above objectives, NSF invests primarily in evidence-based and knowledge-generating approaches to understand and improve STEM learning and learning environments, improve the diversity of STEM students and majors, and prepare STEM majors for the workforce. In addition to contributing to STEM education in the host institution(s), proposals should have the promise of adding more broadly to our understanding of effective teaching and learning practices.

The IUSE: EHR program features two tracks: (1) Engaged Student Learning and (2) Institutional and Community Transformation. Several levels of scope, scale, and funding are available within each track, as summarized in Table 1.

Program Description: HBCU Research Infrastructure for Science and Engineering (RISE) awards support the development of research capability at Historically Black Colleges and Universities that offer doctoral degrees in science and engineering disciplines. Supported projects must have a unifying research focus in one of the research areas supported by NSF, a direct connection to the long-term plans of the host department(s), institutional strategic plan and mission, and plans for expanding institutional research capacity as well as increasing the production of doctoral students, especially those underrepresented in STEM.

Project Description: The Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program develops long-term partnerships among industry, academe, and government. The Centers are catalyzed by an investment from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and are primarily supported by industry Center members, with NSF taking a supporting role in the development and evolution of the Center. Each Center is established to conduct research that is of interest to both the industry members and the Center faculty. An IUCRC contributes to the nation's research infrastructure base and enhances the intellectual capacity of the engineering and science workforce through the integration of research and education. As appropriate, an IUCRC uses international collaborations to advance these goals within the global context.

Project Description: Computational neuroscience provides a theoretical foundation and a rich set of technical approaches for understanding complex neurobiological systems, building on the theory, methods, and findings of computer science, neuroscience, and numerous other disciplines.

Through the CRCNS program, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF), the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR), the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) support collaborative activities that will advance the understanding of nervous system structure and function, mechanisms underlying nervous system disorders, and computational strategies used by the nervous system.

Project Description: The Division of Physics (PHY) supports physics research and the preparation of future scientists in the nation’s colleges and universities across a broad range of physics disciplines that span scales of space and time from the largest to the smallest and the oldest to the youngest. The Division is comprised of disciplinary programs covering experimental and theoretical research in the following major subfields of physics: Accelerator Science; Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics; Computational Physics; Elementary Particle Physics; Gravitational Physics; Integrative Activities in Physics; Nuclear Physics; Particle Astrophysics; Physics of Living Systems; Plasma Physics (supported under a separate solicitation); and Quantum Information Science.

Project Description: The Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) program provides support to enhance the research capabilities of minority-serving institutions (MSI) through the establishment of centers that effectively integrate education and research. MSIs of higher education denote institutions that have undergraduate enrollments of 50% or more (based on total student enrollment) of members of minority groups underrepresented among those holding advanced degrees in science and engineering fields: African Americans, Alaska Natives, American Indians, Hispanic Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Native Pacific Islanders. CREST promotes the development of new knowledge, enhancements of the research productivity of individual faculty, and an expanded presence of students historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. CREST Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (PRF) awards provide research experience and training for early career scientists at active CREST Centers. HBCU-RISE awards specifically target HBCUs to support the expansion of institutional research capacity as well as the production of doctoral students, especially those from groups underrepresented in STEM, at those institutions.

Project Description: A new funding track, Partnerships for Documentary Linguistics Education (PADLE), is offered collaboratively by this program and the Documenting Endangered Languages program (DEL) in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). The strand provides support for collaborations that will improve TCUP institutions' instructional capacity in documentary linguistics (descriptive linguistics, computational methodology, archiving and preservation); attract, retain and support TCUP students in internships and research endeavors deemed to be necessary for a complete curriculum offering; and engage partner universities to provide an academic grounding and a successful transition for students who wish to study or attain degrees in documentary linguistics.

Project Description: The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success for historically underrepresented minority doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty, particularly African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Native Pacific Islanders, in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields. New and innovative models are encouraged, as are models that reproduce and/or replicate existing evidence-based alliances in significantly different disciplines, institutions, and participant cohorts.

Project Description: The complexities of brain and behavior pose fundamental questions in many areas of science and engineering, drawing intense interest across a broad spectrum of disciplinary perspectives while eluding explanation by any one of them. Rapid advances within and across disciplines are leading to an increasingly interwoven fabric of theories, models, empirical methods and findings, and educational approaches, opening new opportunities to understand complex aspects of neural and cognitive systems through integrative multidisciplinary approaches.

This program calls for innovative, convergent, boundary-crossing proposals that can best capture those opportunities and map out new research frontiers. NSF seeks proposals that are bold and risky, and transcend the perspectives and approaches typical of disciplinary research efforts. This cross-directorate program is one element of NSF’s broader effort directed at Understanding the Brain, a multi-year activity that includes NSF’s participation in the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative (http://www.nsf.gov/brain/). NSF envisions a connected portfolio of transformative, integrative projects that create synergistic links across investigators and communities, yielding novel ways of tackling the challenges of understanding the brain in action and in context.

Project Description: This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is designed to support highly integrated research teams of three to six PD/PIs to address ambitious and challenging research questions that are important for the mission of NIGMS and are beyond the scope of one or two investigators. Collaborative program teams are expected to accomplish goals that require considerable synergy and managed team interactions. Project goals should not be achievable with a collection of individual efforts or projects. Teams are encouraged to consider far-reaching objectives that will produce major advances in their fields.

Applications that are mainly focused on the creation, expansion, and/or maintenance of community resources, creation of new technologies or infrastructure development are not appropriate for this FOA.