Featured Opportunities

February 18, 2026

• The National Science Foundation-wide Mid-scale Research Infrastructure opportunity is intended to provide NSF with an agile, Foundation-wide process to fund experimental research capabilities in the mid-scale range between MRI and Major Multi-user Facilities. The Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 (Mid-scale RI-1) emphasizes strong scientific merit, a response to an identified need of the research community and/or fulfillment of a national need to enable U.S. researchers to be competitive in a global research environment. Well-conceived technical and management plans are essential for proposals, as are well-developed plans (e.g., mentoring and professional development) for student training and the involvement of a diverse STEM workforce in all aspects of mid-scale design and/or implementation activities. The inclusion of individual project participants that will lead to a supportive working environment is especially encouraged at all levels of the project team. Within Mid-scale RI-1, proposers may submit two types of projects, “Implementation” (e.g., acquisition and/or construction) or “Design”. The “Design” track is intended to facilitate progress toward readiness for a mid-scale range implementation project. Both Implementation projects and Design activities may involve new or upgraded research infrastructure. Mid-scale RI-1 "Implementation" projects may have a total project cost ranging from $4 million up to but not including $20 million. Mid-scale RI-1 "Design" activities may request less than $4 million, with a minimum request of $400,000 and a maximum request up to but not including $20 million, as appropriate, to prepare for a future mid-scale range implementation project. Mid-scale implementation projects may include any combination of equipment, instrumentation, cyberinfrastructure, broadly used large scale datasets and the personnel needed to successfully commission the project.
• The American Musicological Society’s Elizabeth C. Bartlet Fund accepts applications from doctoral students at or PhD graduates of North American universities to conduct doctoral or post-doctoral musicological research in France. If they seek to conduct research for their dissertation, applicants must have completed all other requirements for the PhD. If they seek to conduct post-doctoral research, they should have completed the PhD within the past five years. Preference will be given to applicants whose home institutions do not offer financial support for musicological research.
• Terra Foundation’s Convening Grants support conversations, symposia, and workshops that stimulate interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange related to the visual arts of the United States and the Indigenous arts of North America. We encourage convenings that expand knowledge, nurture relationships, and inspire shifts in perspectives and practices across local and global networks. The Foundation welcomes proposals from arts centers, community-based cultural organizations (including associations), foundations, museums, research centers, and universities of varying sizes, annual budgets, and diverse geographies, within the United States and internationally. They are open to convenings at any stage of a project: whether in early planning or more developed phases. In-person, virtual, and hybrid formats are eligible for funding. Convening grants typically range between $10,000 and $25,000. Grant support through this program is awarded twice yearly.
• The de Groot Visiting Fellowship Program at the American Library in Paris supports writers, thinkers, and scholars across disciplines who advance dialogue, creativity, and cross-cultural understanding. Established in 2013, the Fellowship extends the Library’s long tradition of fostering transatlantic exchange and creative expression. Each year, two Visiting Fellows and three Scholars of Note pursue their projects in Paris while contributing to the Library’s cultural life through public talks and workshops. Over the past decade, Fellows have enriched the Library’s century-old legacy and, in turn, joined the generations of writers who have found a home in Paris.
• Schmidt Sciences is requesting Proposals to the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), aimed at fostering research in the digital humanities with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. Ideal projects will have co-PIs with expertise from both the humanities and AI and will address research questions from both domains. This request is open to universities and non-profits globally. Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute (HAVI) is a philanthropic initiative which intends to spur innovative, domain-specific research outcomes from humanities scholars through the integral application of AI-inspired tools and techniques as well as produce insights from the humanities that will advance the development of AI.
• Through this forecast of NIH Research Program Projects (Parent P01), the participating Department of Health and Human Services, NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs) encourage pursuit of that mission through the submission of investigator-initiated Program Project (P01) applications. With this Parent P01 NOFO, the NIH ICOs intend to support a broadly based, multidisciplinary, often long-term research program with a specific major scientific objective or theme. The proposed Program Project must be related to the programmatic interests of one or more of the participating ICOs based on their scientific missions. Each application submitted in response to this NOFO must consist of at least two research projects and an administrative core. Additionally, a P01 application may include scientific cores, if needed for the proposed research. The projects included within the Program must share a common central scientific theme, focus, and/or an overall objective.
• Through its Protean opportunity, the Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals for the design of medical countermeasures (MCMs) that provide complete protection against current and future chemical threats. The Protean program is divided into two sequential Phases totaling 33 months, with Phase 1 (Base) being 18 months and Phase 2 (Option) being 15 months. Phase 1 consists of three different focus areas (FAs) based on threat class of interest: 1) nerve agents, 2) synthetic opioids, 3) and ion channel toxins. Performers may propose work that supports one or multiple FAs but must propose to both phases. An evaluation of technical progress will occur continuously throughout the phase, with successful fulfilment of the 16-month milestone and all intermediate metrics being required for progression into Phase 2.
• The Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is issuing a Disruption Opportunity (DO), inviting submissions of innovative basic or applied research concepts in the technical domain of high assurance artificial intelligence systems. Compositional Learning-And-Reasoning for AI Complex Systems Engineering (CLARA) is an exploratory, fundamental research program that aims to create high assurance, broadly applicable AI systems of systems. This will be accomplished by creating a scientific, theory-driven architectural foundation for the hierarchical composition of a wide variety of both Machine Learning (ML) and Automated Reasoning (AR), also known as Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, subsystems. CLARA seeks to create a foundation that is algorithmic, highly reusable, and computationally scalable. DARPA anticipates that successful performers in this program will combine innovations such as higher order logic, probabilistic logic, logical expressivity, hierarchically structured knowledge representation, and interoperable integration of AR and ML. The range of practically important ML and AR techniques and associated model families (termed “kinds” here and fully listed out in section I.H.) that will be explored within this program as constituents for hierarchical composition includes, but is not limited to, Neural Networks (NN), Bayesian ML, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Generalized Additive Models (GAM), Logic Programs (LP), Classical logic, and Answer Set Programs (ASP). Here, LP, Classical, and ASP might also be extended by constraints, a.k.a. constraint programming.
• Though its Climate Change and Human Health Seed Grant program, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund aims to stimulate the growth of new connections between thinkers working in largely disconnected fields, who, together, may change the course of climate change’s impact on human health. They are primarily, but not exclusively, interested in activities that build connections between basic and early biomedical scientific approaches and ecological, environmental, geological, geographic, and planetary-scale thinking, as well as with population-focused fields, including epidemiology and public health, demography, economics, and urban planning. Also of interest is work piloting new approaches or interactions aimed at reducing the impact of health-centered activities, such as developing more sustainable systems for healthcare, care delivery, and biomedical research. Another area of interest is preparation for the impacts of extreme weather and other crises that can lead to large-scale disruptions, immediately affecting human health and the delivery of healthcare. Public outreach, climate communication, and education efforts focused on the intersection of climate and health are also appropriate for this call. This program supports work conceived through many kinds of creative thinking. Successful applicants include academic scientists, physicians, and public health experts, community organizations, science outreach centers, non-biomedical academic departments, and more.
• The National Science Foundation’s Infrastructure Systems and People (ISP) program particularly encourages interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary exploration that will open new research frontiers and significantly expand and transform relevant research communities. The program welcomes research that addresses novel system integration, user-inspired system and service design, data analytics, and socio-technical studies focused on engineering and system innovation during normal and extreme conditions. The program also values innovative research efforts focused on collecting, standardizing, and sharing large-scale databases of real-world infrastructure systems and people-infrastructure interactions during normal and extreme operating conditions, which can be instrumental in providing benchmarks for model verification and validation and for advancing future research innovation in ISP. This program supports research on lifeline systems and communities that contributes to the National Science Foundation’s role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP). Principal Investigators are encouraged to leverage NSF’s investments in the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) experimental, computational modeling and simulation, and data resources (https://www.designsafe-ci.org/) in their research to accelerate advances needed for reducing the impacts of natural hazards on infrastructures and people.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, National Library of Medicine (NLM), through Its Advancing Bioinformatics, Translational Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Research (U24) NOFO, seeks applications for research projects that drive groundbreaking innovation and advanced development in the fields of bioinformatics, translational bioinformatics, and computational biology. The primary goal of this initiative is to support the creation and implementation of cutting-edge methods, tools, and approaches that can transform the landscape of biomedical data science. This NOFO aims to address the growing need to leverage transformative technologies — such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and large-scale computational platforms — to extract actionable knowledge from vast, diverse, and complex biological datasets. By enabling more effective interpretation and integration of multi-dimensional biological and biomedical data, this research will ultimately contribute to improving individual and population health outcomes.