Featured Opportunities

May 1, 2024

• • • This Funding Connection includes eight Department of State, Fulbright Scholar opportunities from countries such as Canada, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Taiwan, Sweden, and Suriname. All can be found under the “International/Multicultural” category.
    • Our Town is the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) creative placemaking grants program. Through project-based funding, the program supports activities that integrate arts, culture, and design into local efforts that strengthen communities over the long term. Our Town projects engage a wide range of local stakeholders in efforts to advance local economic, physical, and/or social outcomes in communities. Competitive projects are responsive to unique local conditions, develop meaningful and substantive engagement in communities, center equity, advance artful lives, and lay the groundwork for long-term systems change. The program requires applicants to demonstrate committed leadership from the local level and evidence of a diverse group of local stakeholders engaged in the proposed project. To be eligible for funding, applicants must demonstrate a required partnership between a nonprofit organization and a local governmental or quasi-governmental entity, and the arts, culture, or design experience necessary to carry out the project. Applications that do not include this required partnership or experience will be ineligible and will not be reviewed. This is a limited submission program. If you are interested in applying you must notify (working title, team list, 2 to 3 sentence project synopsis) the Office of Research Development by June 3, 2024 via ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu.
    • The Department of Education’s Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) Program provides grants to academic departments and programs of institutions of higher education (IHEs) to support graduate fellowships for students with excellent academic records in their previous programs of study who demonstrate financial need and plan to pursue the highest degree available in their course of study at the institution. Any academic department of an IHE is eligible to apply that provides a course of study that—(i) Leads to a graduate degree in an area of national need; and (ii) Has been in existence for at least four years at the time of an application for a grant under this competition.
    • In 2020, the Department of Energy issued the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) DE-FOA-0002364 for the first phase of the Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) Initiative for United States (U.S.) Basins to advance the use of unconventional and secondary feedstocks to produce rare earth elements (REEs), critical minerals (CMs), and novel valuable, nonfuel, carbon-based products (CBPs) as part of our next generation of domestic U.S. materials. Realizing the CM potential in these feedstocks would enable the United States to reduce its dependence on critical minerals and materials (CMM) imports and establish and advance a domestic (CMM)1 supply chain. The purpose of this current Funding Opportunity is to expand the work of the CORE-CM Initiative basinal assessment (see Appendix J) and development of critical mineral supply chains from unconventional and secondary feedstocks. This FOA will expand the focus from the basin scale to a larger, regional scale with the goal of nationwide coverage. Projects will also consider environmental justice, the ongoing energy transformation, and impacts on communities. Successful Applicants do not have to be current or past awardees under DE-FOA-0002364 (Phase 1). Collaboration is strongly encouraged both within the Applicant team and with neighboring regions and the inclusion of DE-FOA-0002364 (Phase 1) project teams or partners is highly encouraged to demonstrate continuity.
    • The goal of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Molecular Foundations for Sustainability: Sustainable Polymers Enabled by Emerging Data Analytics program (MFS-SPEED) is to support fundamental research enabling the accelerated discovery and ultimate manufacturing of sustainable polymers using state-of-the-art data science, and to enhance development of a cross-disciplinary workforce skilled in this area. In particular, through this solicitation the research community is encouraged to address the discovery and elaboration of new sustainable polymers or sustainable pathways to existing polymers by the creation and use of a data-centric environment where research projects: (1) are focused on new approaches to predicting structure and properties of polymers and advanced soft materials; (2) have insights enabled by data analytics including Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning; (3) include more efficient, scalable preparation of monomers and polymers using existing or new synthetic routes; and (4) train a technical workforce that leverages data analytics to create sustainable polymers and soft materials.
    • The Department of Defense, Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity (USAMRAA) is soliciting applications to the fiscal year 2024 (FY24) Tick-Borne Disease Research Program (TBDRP) using delegated authority provided by United States Code, Title 10, Section 4001 (10 USC 4001). The Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) is the program management agent for this funding opportunity. Congress initiated the TBDRP in 2016 to support innovative and impactful research that addresses fundamental issues and gaps in knowledge of tick-borne diseases. Appropriations for the TBDRP from FY16 through FY23 totaled $48.0 million (M). The FY24 appropriation is $7.0M. The TBDRP’s vision is to eliminate the health burden of tick-borne diseases. The TBDRP’s mission is to fund innovative research to understand and provide solutions to prevent, detect, and resolve Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases and conditions for the benefit of Service Members, Veterans, their Families, and the American public. This issue of the Funding Connection contains two opportunities within this program—Therapeutic/Diagnostic Research Award and Idea Development Award.
    • The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K01) provides support and “protected time” (three to five years) for an intensive, supervised career development experience in the biomedical, behavioral, or clinical sciences leading to research independence. Although all of the participating NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) use this support mechanism to support career development experiences that lead to research independence, some ICs use the K01 award for individuals who propose to train in a new field or for individuals who have had a hiatus in their research career because of illness or pressing family circumstances. Other ICs use the K01 to support career development in specific fields.
    • HHS, NCI’s Discovery and Development of Natural Products for Cancer Interception and Prevention (UG3/UH3) supports the discovery and development of novel natural products that are safe, non-toxic, and efficacious for cancer interception and prevention. The UG3 phase will provide up to three years of support for milestone-driven initial target selection, verification of the target in clinical samples and preclinical in vivo studies, assay development, and/or assay validation for target activity, as well as on-target toxicity screening, and pilot screening of natural agents. If UG3 milestones are met, support may be provided for a full-scale screening, identification of active natural compounds, full-scale evaluation of screened individual agents, assessment of the natural product’s effect in vitro and in vivo, and determining the optimal dose for subsequent studies and safety testing in the UH3 phase.
    • The William T. Grant Foundation’s Research Grants on Reducing Inequity support research to build, test, or increase understanding of programs, policies, or practices to reduce inequality in the academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes of young people ages 5-25 in the United States. The Foundation’s research interests center on studies that examine ways to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. They welcome descriptive studies that clarify mechanisms for reducing inequality or elucidate how or why a specific program, policy, or practice operates to reduce inequality. They also welcome intervention studies that examine attempts to reduce inequality. Finally, we welcome studies that improve the measurement of inequality in ways that can enhance the work of researchers, practitioners, or policymakers.
    • NSF’s Perception, Action & Cognition (PAC) program’s aim is to support empirically grounded, theoretically engaged and methodologically sophisticated research in a wide range of topic areas related to human perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes and their interactions. The PAC program welcomes a wide range of perspectives and a variety of methodologies (including computational modeling if the goal is to expand explanatory theories of human perception, action, or cognition). PAC strongly encourages proposals that examine human behavior in realistic (or real-world) scenarios, with more inclusive subject populations than have been used historically. It is expected that knowledge gained from PAC-supported projects will have a clear and direct path towards benefitting society. PAC is open to co-review of proposals submitted to other programs both within the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate and across other directorates. The May-June proposal window is only for conference proposals, not for research proposals. The later maybe submitted during the July-August proposal window.