- Dear Colleague Letter: Growing Convergence Research,
- Deadline: October 15th for a 2-page white paper.
- Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) Core Track:
- Deadline: continuous
- www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503634
- Supports research and training on evolutionary and ecological processes acting at the level of populations, species, communities, and ecosystems. DEB encourages research that elucidates fundamental principles that identify and explain the unity and diversity of life and its interactions with the environment over space and time. Research may incorporate field, laboratory, or collection-based approaches; observational or manipulative studies; synthesis activities; phylogenetic discovery projects; or theoretical approaches involving analytical, statistical, or computational modeling. Proposals should be submitted to the core clusters (Ecosystem Sciences, Evolutionary Processes, Population and Community Ecology, and Systematics and Biodiversity Sciences). DEB also encourages interdisciplinary proposals that cross conceptual boundaries and integrate over levels of biological organization or across multiple spatial and temporal scales. …
- Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID)
- Deadline: November 21, 2018
- https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5269
- The multi-agency Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program supports research on the ecological, evolutionary, and social principles and processes that influence the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. The central theme of submitted projects must be quantitative or computational understanding of pathogen transmission dynamics. The intent is discovery of principles of infectious disease transmission and testing mathematical or computational models that elucidate infectious disease systems. Projects should be broad, interdisciplinary efforts that go beyond the scope of typical studies. They should focus on the determinants and interactions of transmission among humans, non-human animals, and/or plants. This includes, for example, the spread of pathogens; the influence of environmental factors such as climate; the population dynamics and genetics of reservoir species or hosts; the feedback between ecological transmission and evolutionary dynamics; and the cultural, social, behavioral, and economic dimensions of pathogen transmission. Research may be on zoonotic, environmentally-borne, vector-borne, or enteric pathogens of either terrestrial or freshwater systems and organisms, including diseases of animals and plants, at any scale from specific pathogens to inclusive environmental systems. Proposals for research on disease systems of public health concern to developing countries are strongly encouraged, as are disease systems of concern in agricultural systems. Investigators are encouraged to develop the appropriate multidisciplinary team, including for example, modelers, ecologists, bioinformaticians, genomics researchers, social scientists, economists, epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, entomologists, parasitologists, microbiologists, bacteriologists, virologists, pathologists or veterinarians, with the goal of integrating knowledge across disciplines to enhance our ability to predict and control infectious diseases.
- Dear Colleague Letter: Enabling Early-Stage Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Socio-Technical Interdisciplinary Collaborations
- Deadline: 12 Dec 2018
- https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18109/nsf18109.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click
- EAGER mechanism ($300K)
- The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program aims to promote research on the fundamentals of security and privacy as a multidisciplinary subject that will lead to new ways to design, build, and operate cyber systems, protect existing infrastructure, and motivate and educate individuals about cybersecurity. With this DCL, NSF is announcing its intention to encourage the submission of EArly-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) proposals that foster excellent interdisciplinary research in the SaTC domain to be carried out in early-stage collaborations between one or more Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) researchers and one or more Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) researchers. Note that this DCL is focused on collaborations of principal investigators (PIs) who have not previously jointly received a SaTC award.Many scientific and practical challenges of security, privacy, and trust have sociotechnical dimensions, making it important to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations among researchers from the disciplines represented in NSF’s CISE and SBE directorates on topics that draw on the strengths of each researcher. Some of these topics are suggested in the most recent SaTC program solicitation (NSF 18-572), but other topics relevant to the SaTC program are also welcome.
- Understanding the Rules of Life: Epigenetics
- Deadline: February 01, 2019
- https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18600/nsf18600.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click
- URoL:Epigenetics Track 1 (Epigenetics 1): This track provides support for projects with a total budget (including indirect costs) of up to $500,000 and award duration of up to 3 years.
- URoL:Epigenetics Track 2 (Epigenetics 2): This track provides support for projects with a total budget (including indirect costs) of up to $3,000,000 and award duration of up to 5 years.
- The URoL:Epigenetics Program defines epigenetics broadly as any heritable biological or chemical mechanism that produces a phenotypic effect without alteration of the DNA sequence. Examples of epigenetic processes include nucleic acid methylation, post-translational modification of histones, and RNA-based regulatory mechanisms.The URoL:Epigenetics Program is focused on understanding the relationships between epigenetic mechanisms as they relate to the resultant phenotypes of organisms, and the way that these mechanisms lead to robustness and adaptability of organisms and populations. Successful projects are expected to have a cohesive set of goals. Proposals should articulate a convincing plan to potentially increase our understanding of how epigenetic mechanisms lead to emergent properties at varying scales, including the genome, proteome and metabolome, cells, physiology and whole organism, and within populations, species, ecological communities and ecosystems. The URoL:Epigenetics Program strongly encourages proposals aimed at developing a predictive framework and/or a comparative and manipulative experimental approach. Proposed research should model and test hypotheses for understanding the causal relationships between environment, genome, epigenome and phenotypic characteristics, and investigate how these relationships affect the robustness and adaptability of organisms and populations.
The URoL:Epigenetics Program includes participation from the Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR), Engineering (ENG), Geosciences (GEO), Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE), and the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA) at the National Science Foundation. As such, the goals of the program are to foster crosscutting, interdisciplinary research on the epigenetic regulation of organismal phenotypes that integrates perspectives and research approaches from more than one of these directorates. This program aims to support projects that would not traditionally be supported through regular core programs of the participating directorates and offices.
Appropriate approaches for URoL:Epigenetics projects include, but are not limited to: the use of cellular engineering and physical-chemical approaches to manipulate molecular and cellular components to understand cellular and organismal responses to environmental change; investigation of physical, and chemical interactions that underlie epigenetic changes in the structure, packing, function, and dynamics of DNA, RNA and proteins; application of artificial intelligence to identify patterns that reveal the underlying principles to explain how environmental influences on the epigenome lead to phenotypic outcomes; and use of interdisciplinary biological, mathematical, computational, social and behavioral science methods to predict relationships between epigenetic mechanisms, physical, physiological and behavioral phenotypes, physical, social and built environments, and emergent properties at organismal and supra-organismal levels. Projects may be laboratory, field, and/or computer based and may include a focus on terrestrial, aquatic, marine or polar organisms and ecosystems. Projects must extend laboratory and experimental approaches beyond well-established model systems and/or controlled environments to demonstrate how generally the epigenetic mechanism under study explains and predicts the characteristics of living systems.
