Featured Opportunities

October 7, 2026

• The North Central Integrated Pest Management Center (NCIPMC) Working Group Grants support multistate collaboration among researchers, Extension professionals, regulators, and outside stakeholders tackling shared integrated pest management (IPM)-related challenges across the North Central region. Working Groups serve as the collaborative engine of the Center, bringing together people, organizations, expertise, resources, and perspectives to address stakeholder-identified IPM needs that benefit from a regional approach. Working Group activities may include developing or sharing information and educational resources; coordinating pest monitoring, surveillance, data, or regional recommendations; identifying priorities and developing coordinated plans; coordinating Extension, research, regulatory, or stakeholder activities; and responding collectively to emerging or changing pest management needs.
• The Department of Interior, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has released the FY2026 Water Resources Research Act Section 104(g) National Competitive Grants Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). The Kansas Water Institute encourage researchers with relevant expertise to review this opportunity and consider developing a proposal. This year’s 104(g) General competition has a particularly focused research priority: improving the observation, estimation, validation, and forecasting of water use by data centers and other water-intensive industries that rely on public water supply systems. Although the USGS NOFO lists a November 12, 2026, 5:00 p.m. Eastern deadline, individual investigators cannot submit directly to USGS. Applications must be submitted through the designated State Water Resources Research Institute. Therefore, all Kansas proposals must be routed through the Kansas Water Institute, and KWI must receive the complete proposal package no later than November 5, 2026.
• VIA’s Artistic Production Grants fund the production of newly commissioned works of visual art exhibited beyond museum walls, in the public realm, or in non-traditional exhibition environments. These grants are awarded to projects that best exemplify VIA’s three core values of Artistic Production, Thought Leadership, and Public Engagement. Grant amounts range from $25,000 to $100,000.
• The Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science (SC) FY 2027 Continuation of Solicitation for the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program announces its continuing interest in receiving applications for support of work in the following program areas: Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High Energy and Nuclear Physics, and Isotope R&D and Production. This NOFO is their annual open solicitation that covers all research areas in SC and is open throughout the fiscal year. Any research within SC’s congressionally authorized mission may be proposed under this NOFO. All of the project areas can be found starting on page 11 of the NOFO.
• The National Aeronautics and Space Administrations (NASA) Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program focuses on early-stage exploration of visionary concepts in alignment with national space priorities and commercial aerospace goals. Consistent with Science: A New Golden Age and as explicitly stated in the accompanying OMB Memorandum NSTM-5 / M-26-16, foundational research including basic and use-inspired inquiry across the sciences and engineering remains the bedrock of American scientific and technological leadership. Accordingly, NIAC solicits concepts from any field that offers a radically different approach or disruptive innovation that may significantly enhance or enable new human or robotic aerospace missions. NIAC is particularly interested in concepts that are creative and unexplored; ideas that have been explored, but not yet applied, are generally not appropriate unless there is a novel aspect that significantly increases its benefit or feasibility.
• The Simons Foundation’s Mathematics and Physical Sciences division invites proposals for its Simons Symposia Series, which brings together mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists to interact and collaborate in a series of three symposia, held every two years and focusing on one topic or a tightly connected group of topics. The first meetings in the new series will start in the summer of 2028, and the foundation expects to select up to two series in mathematics and two series in theoretical physics. A symposium series consists of up to three weeklong meetings on one topic or a tightly connected group of topics. A symposium series is initially approved for one year and renewed for up to two more meetings if successful. If the first meeting in the series occurs in year N, then subsequent meetings would occur in years N+2 and N+4. Each symposium in the series may have up to 23 participants, including its organizing committee (two to four leaders in a field). It will have a schedule that leaves sufficient time for collaborations and open-ended discussions, with up to four lectures per day over five days. In some areas, a tight focus on a new research development or a specific research problem would be appropriate; in others, a symposium might help set an agenda for the field.
• As the Amazon’s Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program continues to expand in scope, so does our call for proposals list. To that end, starting October 1, they will open the Fall 2026 call for proposals in nine research areas : Agentic AI; AI for Information Security; Amazon Security; Automated Reasoning; AWS Cryptography; Build on Trainium: Agentic, Recursive Improvement of Kernels and Frameworks; Multilingual and Contextual AI Evaluation; On-Device Multimodal Perception; and Synthetic Data Generation for Multimodal Perception. ARA provides grant recipients unrestricted funds and AWS promotional credits. Funded projects are assigned an Amazon research contact, and recipients also receive training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers.
• Amazon’s Amazon Scholars Program is designed for academics from universities around the globe who want to work on large-scale technical challenges while continuing to teach and conduct research at their universities. Scholars can work with Amazon on a flexible basis —including part-time arrangements or during sabbaticals — while maintaining their university positions. The program welcomes academics across career stages, from pre-tenure to senior faculty members. Applications are accepted from academic experts in research areas including, but not limited to: artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, data science, economics, optimization, quantum computing, robotics, statistics, sustainability, operations research, environmental science, and robotics.
• Research supported by the National Science Foundation’s Chemical Process Systems (CPS) program covers the full breadth of chemical and biochemical process innovation. It spans reaction engineering and molecular thermodynamics; reactor design; catalysis; electrochemical systems; separations; and process design. The program encourages proposals that connect the molecular scale to process and plant scales. The CPS program explores active-site structure and function, reaction mechanisms, in situ and operando characterization, durability, and device-level integration. Microreactors, membrane and catalytic reactors, atmospheric plasmas, and other novel configurations are of interest. The program supports research in catalysis and electrochemical systems to produce, use, and store energy, to reduce waste, to process polymers, and to synthesize fuels and chemicals. This includes process and materials innovation to support the nuclear fuel cycle. The CPS program also targets chemical and biological separations that are efficient and scalable. Research includes the design of membranes, sorbents, and specialized interfaces. Advances can be used in gas separations, the recovery of critical minerals, bioprocessing, and protein and water purification.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, National Cancer Institute (NCI), through its Advanced Development and Validation of Emerging Technologies for Basic and Clinical Cancer Research (R33) invites grant applications proposing exploratory research projects focused on further development and technical validation of emerging technologies offering novel capabilities for the molecular or cellular characterization of cancer or for improved handling and quality control of biospecimens used for basic, clinical, or epidemiological cancer research. This NOFO solicits R33 applications where major feasibility gaps for the technology or methodology have been overcome, as demonstrated with supportive preliminary data, but still require further development and rigorous technical validation to encourage adoption by the research community. Well-suited applications must propose the development of technologies that offer the potential to accelerate and/or enhance research in the areas of cancer biology, early detection and screening, clinical diagnosis, treatment, cancer control, epidemiology. Technologies proposed for development may have potential for widespread applicability but must be focused in this proposal on cancer-relevant use cases. Projects proposing to apply or use existing technologies for hypothesis-driven research where the novelty resides in the biological or clinical target/question being pursued are not responsive to this solicitation and will not be reviewed.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, NIH, Centers for Structural Biology of HIV and Other Infectious Diseases (U54) supports multidisciplinary consortia of structural biologists, microbiologists, and associated experts to solve complex biological structures related to the prevention, treatment, and cure of HIV and other infectious diseases. Centers are expected to facilitate new collaborations, leverage shared resources, offer services and resources to the research community, and train the next generation of scientists engaged in structural biology of infectious diseases.