Featured Opportunities

August 12, 2026

• The Department of Agriculture, NFA’s Sun Grant Program requests proposals to (1) enhance national energy security through the development, distribution, and implementation of biobased energy technologies; (2) promote varied agricultural production systems in the United States through biobased energy and product technologies; (3) promote economic growth in rural areas of the United States through biobased energy and product technologies; and (4) enhance the efficiency of bioenergy and biomass research and development programs through improved coordination and collaboration among the USDA, other appropriate Federal agencies, and Land-grant Institutions.
• The Department of Agriculture, NIFA Higher Education Challenge Grant (HEC) program is soliciting applications for the FY 2026 HEC grants program. HEC supports U.S. colleges and universities in delivering high quality, evidence based academic programs that prepare citizens, nationals, or permanent residents of the United States for leadership and professional roles in the Nation’s food and agricultural sciences workforce. HEC’s purpose is to strengthen institutional capacities, including curriculum, faculty, scientific instrumentation, and student recruitment and retention. The HEC program is focused on developing and improving formal master’s or doctorate degree level food and agricultural sciences education and first professional degree-level education in veterinary medicine, such as a doctorate in veterinary medicine (DVM). The HEC program provides eligible applicants with funding to help ensure that a competent and qualified workforce will exist to serve the food and agricultural sciences system. At the same time, HEC-funded projects improve the economic health and viability of communities through the development of degree programs emphasizing new and emerging employment opportunities. HEC projects address the national challenge to increase the number of advanced degree students entering the food and agricultural sciences.
• The new Patterson Family Foundation’s Patterson Fellows program invests in the development of entrepreneurial leaders whose innovations strengthen rural communities. By tackling systemic challenges with cutting-edge discoveries, collaborative breakthroughs, and big ideas, the Patterson Fellows will help create the opportunities and solutions that allow rural places to thrive for generations to come. The Patterson Fellows program is a cohort-based model that will support high caliber, high-impact entrepreneurs for a three-year period, with the goal of igniting viable, scalable companies for change in rural communities.
• The AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships (STPF) provide opportunities to outstanding scientists and engineers to learn first-hand about policymaking while contributing their knowledge and analytical skills to the federal policymaking process. The benefits of being a felloware numerous and include a stipend, a yearlong series of professional development workshops, access to the STPF fellows’ network, professional opportunities for leadership and science communication, and more.There are four fellowship areas. You may apply for up to two. They are the executive branch fellowship, the judicial branch fellowship, the legislative branch fellowship, and the Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship (which places fellows in both nonprofit organizations and the federal government).
• The Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is pleased to offer four Solmsen Fellowships for the academic year 2027-2028, to be awarded to scholars from outside the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Through a generous bequest from Friedrich and Lieselotte Solmsen, the Solmsen Fellowship sponsors humanities scholars working on European history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, art, music, and culture in the classical, medieval, and/or early modern periods before 1700. Projects on the relationship of pre-1700 Europe to other parts of the world are also welcome. The Solmsen Fellowship does not typically support editions, anthologies, or translations. Proposals in the performing and creative arts, including works of fiction, are not generally supported, but such projects with a substantive research component in the humanities may be considered. Contact the IRH Director if you have questions about the definition of "substantive research" as it relates to your project.
• The Department of Education, Institute of Educational Sciences (IES), National Center for Education Research’s (NCER) Using Longitudinal Data to Support State Education Policymaking program invites applications for projects that will contribute to its Using Longitudinal Data to Support State Education Policymaking (Using Data for Policymaking) grants program (ALN 84.305S). Through this grant program, IES supports state agencies’ use of their statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDSs) to provide evidence for their own program and policy decisions, and those of their local education agencies regarding increasing learners’ access to high-quality education and increased academic achievement. (A separate program, IES’s Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program, provides grants, resources, and services to support states as they design, develop, implement, and expand their SLDSs.
• The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Alternative Fuels and Feedstocks Office(AFFO) announced its intent to fund the advancement of novel, high-impact chemical technologies. The proposed funding opportunity, Accelerating Scale-up and Pre-piloting of Emerging Chemical Technologies (ASPECT), will advance technologies for producing chemicals from alternative and waste feedstocks. In accordance with President Trump’s Executive Order Unleashing American Energy, this funding opportunity will strengthen domestic supply chains, reduce reliance on foreign imports, and accelerate American technology innovation. More than 96% of manufactured goods rely on products from the U.S. chemical sector, which directly employs more than half a million Americans. The ASPECT funding opportunity will reinforce domestic manufacturing and chemical supply chains by expanding the use of alternative feedstocks. Funding provided through ASPECT will target chemical technologies that improve performance, reduce costs, and show large market growth potential.
• The Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) is pleased to announce a Notice of Program Interest (NOPI), on behalf of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) for an upcoming Request for Proposals (RFP) to be released in early Fall 2026 to select colleges and universities for participation in DOE’s MineralWorks: American Critical Materials Challenge (MineralWorks Challenge). The rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing data centers, microelectronics, battery gigafactories, grid infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing depends on secure, scalable, and robust supply chains for critical minerals and materials (CMMs). According to the 2023 DOE Critical Materials Assessment, co-authored by Argonne, 18 minerals — including neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium, terbium, gallium, lithium, cobalt, nickel, natural graphite — are considered critical for the period 2025 to 2035 because they are indispensable for advanced energy technologies yet vulnerable to supply disruptions. Central to this technology expansion and secure and resilient CMM supply chains is a workforce skilled in emerging technologies and ready to bring modern innovations to extraction, processing, advanced manufacturing, and supply chain operations. Targeted workforce solutions must be deployed to address the acute skills gap spanning these sectors. Current workforce pipelines to support these sectors are insufficient, with significant declines in mining and process engineering graduates, an aging labor force, and competition across industries and technologies for limited resources that threaten future manufacturing capacity.
• The Department of Energy (DOE), in collaboration with industry partners, has announced a new class of open-weight foundation models designed specifically to accelerate scientific discovery as part of DOE’s broader Genesis Mission initiative. These Genesis models aim to provide researchers, national laboratories, industry partners, and the broader open science community with powerful, transparent, and extensible AI models that can be adapted to a wide range of scientific domains and use cases. The first model in this class will be Genesis-Science-1, developed in partnership with Arcee. By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science: enabling new workflows in materials discovery, energy systems, earth systems modeling, fusion, biology, high-energy physics, and beyond. This effort is grounded in the principles of open science, reproducibility, and responsible AI, with the goal of lowering barriers to advanced AI capabilities for the public good.
• The Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals in the following technical area: physics and nonlinear control of inertial measurement units (IMUs) appropriate for tactical and unmanned missions. The Precision Inertial Navigation & Positioning On an Integrated Tesseract (PINPOINT) program will challenge the research community to overcome the decade-long performance plateau of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) IMUs by exploring revolutionary sensor architectures that operate in highly nonlinear regimes. DARPA is soliciting proposals for the research and development of novel inertial sensors based on physics such as, but not limited to, electromagnetically levitated proof masses, non-linear resonators, and high-velocity tethered microsystems. A central theme of this program is the tight co-design of the physical sensor package with advanced, real-time adaptive control systems necessary to stabilize and harness these complex dynamics. Performers should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.
• The goal of the National Science Foundation’sInterfacial Engineering program is to support fundamental research on atomic- and molecular-scale interfacial phenomena and engineering of interfacial properties, processes, and materials. Fundamental understanding of the thermodynamic, kinetic, and transport properties of interfacial systems underpins improvements in chemical process efficiency and resource utilization. As such, proposed research should have a clear vision for how the results will translate to practice in or otherwise advance industrial chemical or biochemical processes. The program encourages proposals that present new approaches to long-standing challenges or address emerging research areas and technologies. Collaborative and interdisciplinary proposals are also encouraged, particularly those that involve a combination of experiment with theory or modeling.
• The goal of the National Science Foundation’sBiophotonics program is to explore the research frontiers in photonics principles, engineering and technology that are relevant for critical problems in fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Fundamental engineering research and innovation in photonics is required to lay the foundations for new technologies beyond those that are mature and ready for application in medical diagnostics and therapies. Advances are needed in nanophotonics, optogenetics, contrast and targeting agents, ultra-thin probes, wide field imaging, and rapid biomarker screening. Low cost and minimally invasive medical diagnostics and therapies are key motivating application goals.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, ARPA-H Innovative Solutions Opening (ISO) seeks solution summaries and proposal submissions for projects that fall within the general scope of the ARPA-H Health Science Futures (HSF) mission office. HSF expands what is technically possible by developing approaches that will remove the scientific and technological limitations that stymie progress towards the healthcare of the future. HSF supports cutting-edge, often disease-agnostic research programs that have the potential for translational real-world change.