May 5 2021

Featured opportunities for May 5, 2021

Find these featured opportunities and more in the full Funding Connection.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Projects for the Public supports projects that interpret and analyze humanities content in primarily digital platforms and formats, such as websites, mobile applications and tours, interactive touch screens and kiosks, games, and virtual environments. All projects should demonstrate the potential to attract a broad, general, non-specialist audience, either online or in person at venues such as museums, libraries, or other cultural institutions. Applicants may also choose to identify particular communities and groups, including students, to whom a project may have particular appeal.
NEH’s Short Documentaries program supports the production and distribution of documentary films up to 30 minutes that engage audiences with humanities ideas in appealing ways. The program aims to extend the humanities to new audiences through the medium of short documentary films. Films must be grounded in humanities scholarship. The Short Documentaries program supports production of single films or a series of thematically-related short films addressing significant figures, events, or ideas. The proposed film(s) must be intended for regional or national distribution, via broadcast, festivals, and/or online distribution. The subject of the film(s) must be related to “A More Perfect Union”: NEH Special Initiative Advancing Civic Education and Commemorating the Nation’s 250th Anniversary.
NEH’s Summer Stipends program aims to stimulate new research in the humanities and its publication by providing small awards to individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. Projects can be at any stage of development, but especially early-stage research and late-stage writing in which small awards are the most effective. Summer Stipends support continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months. NEH funds may support recipients’ compensation, travel, and other costs related to the proposed scholarly research.
The Kansas Health Foundation (KHF), through its Kansas Digital Equity and Inclusion Collaborative Request for Proposals. will engage four organizations to co-create and implement a shared agenda to advocate for greater digital access, literacy and broadband adoption to support longterm goals of improving equitable educational and economic outcomes. These organizations will facilitate the development of a bold new strategic planning process to create a framework for advocating for policies, programs and services that promote digital inclusion. These frameworks will focus on developing plans that work toward convenient access to a stable, robust internet connection and appropriate devices, and connecting residents to resources for digital literacy skills. At the center of these collaboratives should be the voices of families most impacted, as partners work together to identify and address systemic barriers.
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS) program seeks to accelerate research in areas that will potentially have significant impact on emerging Next Generation (NextG) wireless and mobile communication, networking, sensing, and computing systems, along with global-scale services, with a focus on greatly improving the resiliency of such networked systems among other performance metrics. Modern communication devices, systems, and networks are expected to support a broad range of critical and essential services, incorporating computation, coordination, and intelligent decision making. Resiliency of such systems, which subsumes security, adaptability, and autonomy, will be a key driving factor for future NextG network systems. Resiliency in both design and operations ensures robust network and computing capabilities that exhibit graceful performance- and service-degradation with rapid adaptability under even extreme operating scenarios. The RINGS program seeks innovations to enhance both resiliency as well as performance across the various aspects of NextG communications, networking and computing systems. This program seeks to go beyond the current research portfolio within the individual participating directorates by simultaneously emphasizing gains in resiliency (through security, adaptability and/or autonomy) across all layers of the networking protocol and computation stacks as well as in throughput, latency, and connection density.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH Directors Early Independence Awardsupports exceptional junior investigators who wish to pursue independent research soon after completion of their terminal doctoral degree or post-graduate clinical training, thereby forgoing the traditional post-doctoral training period and accelerating their entry into an independent research career. For the program to support the best possible researchers and research, applications are sought which reflect the full diversity of the research workforce. Individuals from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups and from the full spectrum of eligible institutions in all geographic locations, are strongly encouraged to apply to this Funding Opportunity Announcement. In addition, applications in all topics relevant to the broad mission of NIH are welcome, including, but not limited to, topics in the behavioral, social, biomedical, applied, and formal sciences and topics that may involve basic, translational, or clinical research.
HHS, NIH Systems Approach to Understand Mechanisms of Heterogeneous Response to Influenze (R01) supports the identification of mechanisms behind heterogeneous responses in the population to seasonal influenza infection and/or vaccination through development and application of computational tools. Tools that can integrate molecular, genetic, cellular, patient and/or population-level data sets would specifically be targeted. The application of these tools to data being produced in existing clinical trials and cohort studies will reveal novel correlates of protection and risk for influenza as well as reveal mechanisms behind the observed outcomes. Applications are sought that propose well-integrated, cross-disciplinary research teams with strong computational expertise. Outreach activities that will inform researchers about the approaches and resources (datasets, analysis tools) generated under this initiative and promote collaborations with the pertinent scientific communities are encouraged. Examples of appropriate outreach forums may include, for example, the organization of hands-on workshops to promote the use of the analysis tools developed by the program.
HHS, NIAID, through its Research Projects to Improve the Predictive Value of Animal Models in Recapitulating Human Immunity to Influenza Infection and Vaccination (R01), has a specific interest in improving existing animal models to more closely mimic the events that occur in humans during the development and maintenance of immunity to influenza, which are shaped by sequential exposures via natural infection or vaccination, as outlined in NIAID’s Universal Influenza Vaccine Strategic Plan. This initiative will support research to improve existing animal models or develop novel animal models that more accurately represent influenza immunity in humans, with an emphasis on increasing the predictive value of models for evaluating novel universal influenza vaccines.
The Department of Defense’s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs this week released its breast cancer research opportunities: Breakthrough Award Levels 1 and 2, Breakthrough Award Level 3, Breakthrough Award Level 4, Innovator Award, Transformative Breast Cancer Research Award, and Era of Hope Scholar Award.
NSF’s Perception, Action and Cognition (PAC) program funds theoretically motivated research on a wide-range of topic areas related to typical human behavior with particular focus on perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes and their interactions. Central research topics for consideration by the program include (but are not limited to) vision, audition, haptics, attention, memory, written and spoken language, spatial cognition, motor control, categorization, reasoning, and concept formation. Of particular interest are emerging areas, such as the interaction of sleep or emotion with cognitive or perceptual processes, epigenetics of cognition, computational models of cognition, and cross-modal and multimodal processing. The program welcomes a wide range of perspectives, such as individual differences, symbolic and neural-inspired computation, ecological approaches, genetics and epigenetics, nonlinear dynamics and complex systems, and a variety of methodologies spanning the range of experimentation and modeling. The PAC program 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 Retirement Research Foundation’s Advancements in the Field of Aging Grants fund research that seeks to identify interventions, policies and practices to improve the well-being of older adults and/or their caregivers. Preference is given to projects aimed at generating practical knowledge and guidance that can be used by advocates, policy-makers, providers, and the aging network. Of particular interest are: (1) Interventional trials; translational studies; and health services and policy research; (2) Projects that build on the investigator’s past studies; and (3) Proposals that include robust dissemination plans, if appropriate, to assure that findings reach audiences positioned to act on them.