Featured Opportunities

June 4, 2025

• The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. NSF encourages submission of CAREER proposals from early-career faculty at all CAREER-eligible organizations and especially encourages women, members of underrepresented minority groups, and persons with disabilities to apply.
• The Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Fellowships provide a uniquely interdisciplinary and creative community that each year spans the sciences, arts, humanities, and social sciences. This diversity of approaches and expertise sets our program apart from other fellowship opportunities. With access to Harvard's unparalleled resources, Harvard Radcliffe Fellows can dive deeply into their projects while engaging with scholars, writers, and artists with whom they might not otherwise connect. Along with their cohort, Radcliffe Fellows join an exceptional network of alumni, making an impact in their professional fields and in the larger world. In addition to the stipend, project expense allowance, and additional funds to aid in relocation mentioned above, fellows receive office or studio space in Byerly Hall—in Radcliffe Yard—and full-time Harvard appointments as visiting fellows, granting them access to Harvard University's libraries, and athletic facilities. If fellows would like to hire Harvard undergraduate students as Research Partners, we will cover their hourly wages. Fellows will also be able to participate in professional development and engagement opportunities throughout their fellowship year.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, NIH announced that in October it will release an RFA for its Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) program supports innovative educational activities that encourage pre-college students (pre-kindergarten to grade 12), to pursue further studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), particularly in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. The program will support classroom-based projects for pre-kindergarten to grade 12 (pre-college) students and teachers and informal science education (ISE) projects conducted in outside-the-classroom venues such as after-school science programs and libraries. Projects that support quantitative and computational skills development are strongly encouraged.
• Through NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) initiative, the agency continues to make a substantial commitment to the highest caliber undergraduate STEM education through a Foundation-wide framework of investments. The IUSE: EDU is a core NSF STEM education program that seeks to promote novel, creative, and transformative approaches to generating and using new knowledge about STEM teaching and learning to improve STEM education for undergraduate students. The program is open to application from all institutions of higher education and associated organizations. NSF places high value on educating students to be leaders and innovators in emerging and rapidly changing STEM fields as well as educating a scientifically literate public. In pursuit of this goal, IUSE: EDU supports projects that seek to bring recent advances in STEM knowledge into undergraduate education, that adapt, improve, and incorporate evidence-based practices into STEM teaching and learning, and that lay the groundwork for institutional improvement in STEM education. In addition to innovative work at the frontier of STEM education, this program also encourages replication of research studies at different types of institutions and with different student bodies to produce deeper knowledge about the effectiveness and transferability of findings.
• In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, the Spencer Foundation has developed a Rapid Response Bridge Grant opportunity for impacted scholars, in collaboration with The Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF. While it is impossible for private philanthropy to close the gap left by federal funders, we can provide modest grants to mitigate some of the impact on scholars, projects, and project teams. These $25,000 grants are for activities to address immediate needs following grant cancellations, including completing a wave of data collection, analyzing already collected data or writing, thoughtful project closure with community partners, or preparing grant proposals to continue the research. To be eligible for these grants, scholars must: (1) be working on research on STEM and education (including AI and CS, graduate education and MSIs, and scholarship that aims to reduce inequality), and (2) have had a recently terminated or cancelled grant from NSF. Where possible, we will prioritize early-career scholars.
• The overarching goal of NSF’s Strengthening the Cyberinfrastructure Professional Ecosystem (SCIPE) is to democratize access to the Agency’s advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem and ensure fair and equitable access to resources, services, and expertise by strengthening how Cyberinfrastructure Professionals (CIP) function in this ecosystem. It aims to achieve this by (1) deepening the integration of CIPs into the research enterprise, and (2) fostering innovative and scalable education, training, and development of instructional materials, to address emerging needs and unresolved bottlenecks in CIP workforce development. Specifically, this solicitation seeks to nurture, grow and recognize the national CIP[1] workforce that is essential for creating, utilizing and supporting advanced CI to enable and potentially transform fundamental science and engineering (S&E) research and education and contribute to the Nation's overall economic competitiveness and security. Together, the principal investigators (PIs), technology platforms, tools, and expert CIP workforce supported by this solicitation operate as an interdependent ecosystem wherein S&E research and education thrive. This solicitation will support NSF’s advanced CI ecosystem with a scalable, agile, and sustainable network of CIPs that can ensure broad adoption of advanced CI resources and expert services including platforms, tools, methods, software, data, and networks for research communities, to catalyze major research advances, and to enhance researchers' abilities to lead the development of new CI. Note this is a limited submission. If you are interested in submitting to this program, you must notify (working title, team list, 2-3 sentence synopsis) the Office of Research Development by 5 pm October 1, 2025 via ordlimitedsubs@ksu.edu.
• The Burroughs Wellcome Fund, through its Climate Change and Human Health Seed Grants, 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. Between Fall 2023 and Summer 2026, we will dedicate $1 million to supporting small, early-stage grants of $2,500–$50,000 toward achieving this goal. 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.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, NIH announced a Short-term Extension to Early-Stage Investigator (ESI) Eligibility Period which grants the automatic extension of Early-Stage Investigator (ESI) eligibility. This extension addresses delays impacting grant application submissions, peer review, or award processing timelines between January 1, 2025, and May 31, 2025, and seeks to mitigate their effects on the biomedical research community. This notice extends to October 2025 eligibility for this status for affected investigators.
• NSF’s Developmental Sciences program supports research that addresses developmental processes within the domains of perceptual, cognitive, social, emotional, language, and motor development across the lifespan by working with any appropriate populations for the topics of interest including infants, children, adolescents, adults (including aging populations), and non-human animals. The program also supports research investigating factors that affect developmental change, including family, peers, school, community, culture, media, physical, genetic, and epigenetic influences. The program funds research that incorporates multidisciplinary, multi-method, and/or longitudinal approaches; develops new methods, models, and theories for studying development; and integrates different processes (e.g., memory, emotion, perception, cognition), levels of analysis (e.g., behavioral, social, neural) and time scales. The program funds basic research that advances our understanding of developmental processes and mechanisms; the program does not fund clinical trials and research focused primarily on health outcomes.
• The Russell Sage Foundation’s (RSF) program on the Future of Worksupports innovative research on the causes and consequences of changes in the quality of jobs for low- and moderately paid workers and their families in the U.S. They seek investigator-initiated research proposals that will broaden our understanding of the role of changes in employer practices, the nature of the labor market and public policies on employment, earnings, and job quality. We are especially interested in proposals that address questions about the interplay of market and non-market forces in shaping the wellbeing of workers. RSF prioritizes analyses that make use of newly available data or demonstrate novel uses of existing data. We support original data collection when a project is focused on important program priorities, projects that conduct survey or field experiments and qualitative studies. RSF encourages methodological variety and inter-disciplinary collaboration. Proposed projects must have well-developed conceptual frameworks and rigorous research designs. Analytical models must be well-specified and research methods must be appropriate.
• The Russell Sage Foundation’s program on Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration supports innovative investigator-initiated research that examines the roles of race, ethnicity, nativity, legal status —and their interactions with each other and other social categories—in the social, economic, and political outcomes for immigrants, U.S.-born racial and ethnic minorities, and native-born whites. RSF encourages multi-disciplinary perspectives and methods that both strengthen the data, theory, and methods of social science research and improve our understanding of how to foster the ideals of a pluralist society. Proposals may focus on any one or more of the issues—race, and/or ethnicity, and/or immigration. RSF prioritizes analyses that make use of newly available data or demonstrate novel uses of existing data. We support original data collection when a project is focused on important program priorities, projects that conduct survey or field experiments and qualitative studies. RSF encourages methodological variety and inter-disciplinary collaboration. Proposed projects must have well-developed conceptual frameworks and rigorous research designs. Analytical models must be well-specified and research methods must be appropriate.