Grant opportunities winter 2009 conference v.2.doc

List of Current Federal Grant Opportunities

Prepared for the

Federation of Earth Science Information Partners

2009 Winter Conference

January 5, 2009

The following listing of opportunities was compiled from listings on individual agency websites and from Grants.gov. The opportunities are organized by agency and represent our best attempt to give you a current list of solicitations from agencies committed to supporting science.

We always are interested your feedback on this so please forward any comments to: brian.rogan@earthsciencefoundation.org

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE – NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION (NOAA)

FY 2008 Broad Agency Announcement NFA-NFA-2008-2001388

Due Date for Applications: Sep 30, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown

Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: Award Floor: URL: http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do;jsessionid=1GGlJJ6NpTDkS36g3SLFhHc5QJJznwfmpCNFPQ86GrGG9VTndhQ8!510160981?oppId=41695&flag2006=false&mode=VIEW

Overview: The purpose of this notice is to request proposals for special projects and programs associated with the Agency’s strategic plan and mission goals, as well as to provide the general public with information and guidelines on how NOAA will select proposals and administer discretionary Federal assistance under this BAA. This BAA is a mechanism to encourage research, education and outreach, innovative projects, or sponsorships that are not addressed through our competitive discretionary programs. It is not a mechanism for awarding Congressionally directed funds. Funding for potential projects in this notice is contingent upon the availability of Fiscal Year 2008 and Fiscal Year 2009 appropriations. Applicants are hereby given notice that funds have not yet been appropriated for any proposed activities in this notice. Publication of this announcement does not oblige NOAA to review an application beyond an initial administrative review, or to award any specific project, or to obligate any available funds. DATES: Full applications can be submitted on a rolling basis starting April 22, 2008, up to 5 PM Eastern Daylight Time September 30, 2009. Applications received after this time will not be reviewed or considered for funding.

Please note: There is no guarantee funds will be available when your application is received.

Contacts: Steve Drescher Policy Advisor Phone 301-713-0926

FY 2008 Broad Agency Announcement - NFA-NFA-2008-2001388 **NEW**

Due Date for Applications: September 30, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www07.grants.gov/search/downloadAtt.do;jsessionid=LvbWrhP1n92F4tnvGCdchJ0lXMx434vJhpL2PYHQkBK5kN0pFRty!1806055922?flag2006=false&attId=27277

Overview: The purpose of this notice is to request proposals for special projects and programs associated with the Agency’s strategic plan and mission goals, as well as to provide the general public with information and guidelines on how NOAA will select proposals and administer discretionary Federal assistance under this BAA. This BAA is a mechanism to encourage research, education and outreach, innovative projects, or sponsorships that are not addressed through our competitive discretionary programs.

In furtherance of this objective, NOAA issues this BAA for extramural research, innovative projects, and sponsorships (e.g., conferences, newsletters etc.) that address one or more of the following five mission goal descriptions contained in the NOAA Strategic Plan: 1. Protect, Restore, and Manage the Use of Coastal and Ocean Resources through an Ecosystem Approach to Management; 2. Understand Climate Variability and Change to Enhance Society's Ability to Plan and Respond; 3. Serve Society's Needs for Weather and Water Information; 4. Support the Nation's Commerce with Information for Safe, Efficient, and Environmentally Sound Transportation; and 5. Provide Critical Support for NOAA's Mission.

Contacts: National Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS); Ingrid Guch; Telephone: 301-763-8282 National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); JoAnna Grable; Telephone: 301-713-1364 National Ocean Service (NOS); Jane Piercy; Telephone: 301-713-3050 National Weather Service (NWS); Youngnan Cohan; Telephone: 301-713-0420 Office of Atmospheric Research (OAR); Sharon Schroeder; Telephone: 301-713-2474 NOAA Office of Education (OED); Sarah Schoedinger; Telephone: 704-370-3528

2009 NMFS-Sea Grant Fellowships in Marine Resource Economics OAR-SG-2009-2001574

Due Date for Applications: Feb 20, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 2

Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: unknown Award Floor: unknown URL: http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do;jsessionid=0YK0JKYZZHlNSmLntKyWGPNL3hFbnptHLrbwz38mQskW8p3Lk6gL!1216815379?oppId=42325&flag2006=false&mode=VIEW

Overview: The Graduate Fellowship Program generally awards two new PhD fellowships each year to students who are interested in careers related to the development and implementation of quantitative methods for assessing the economics of the conservation and management of living marine resources. Fellows will work on thesis problems of public interest and relevance to NMFS under the guidance of NMFS mentors at participating NMFS Science Centers or Laboratories. The NMFS-Sea Grant Fellowships in Marine Resource Economics meets NOAA's Mission goal of ``Protect, Restore and Manage the Use of Coastal and Ocean Resources Through Ecosystem-Based Management.

Contacts: Steve Drescher Policy Advisor Phone 301-713-0926

2009 NMFS-Sea Grant Fellowships in Population Dynamics OAR-SG-2009-2001573

Due Date for Applications: Feb 20, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 2

Estimated Total Program Funding: Award Ceiling: Award Floor: URL: http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do;jsessionid=0YK0JKYZZHlNSmLntKyWGPNL3hFbnptHLrbwz38mQskW8p3Lk6gL!1216815379?oppId=42326&flag2006=false&mode=VIEW

Overview: The Graduate Fellowship Program generally awards two new PhD fellowships each year to students who are interested in careers related to the development and implementation of quantitative methods for assessing the economics of the conservation and management of living marine resources. Fellows will work on thesis problems of public interest and relevance to NMFS under the guidance of NMFS mentors at participating NMFS Science Centers or Laboratories. The NMFS-Sea Grant Fellowships in Population Dynamics meets NOAA's Mission goal of ``Protect, Restore and Manage the Use of Coastal and Ocean Resources Through Ecosystem-Based Management.

Contacts: Steve Drescher Policy Advisor Phone 301-713-0926

NOAA Bay Watershed Education and Training (B-WET) Program SEC-OED-2009-2001648

Due Date for Applications: Jan 26, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards:

Estimated Total Program Funding: $2,000,000 Award Ceiling: Award Floor: URL: http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do;jsessionid=0YK0JKYZZHlNSmLntKyWGPNL3hFbnptHLrbwz38mQskW8p3Lk6gL!1216815379?oppId=44429&flag2006=false&mode=VIEW

Overview: The NOAA Bay Watershed Education and Training (B-WET) Program is an environmental education program that supports experiential learning through local competitive grant awards in specific geographic regions. Prior to 2008 NOAA B-WET Programs were established for the Chesapeake Bay, California, and the Hawaiian Islands. As of 2008, three new programs are in place in New England, the northern Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest. In FY09, it is anticipated that funds will be available for each of these three regions. Proposals are currently being solicited from the Pacific Northwest region, the northern Gulf of Mexico region, and the New England region. For the purposes of this solicitation, these three regions are defined as follows: a. Pacific Northwest--the states of Oregon and Washington; b. Northern Gulf of Mexico--the states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas; c. New England--the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. NOAA recognizes that knowledge and commitment built from firsthand experience, especially in the context of one's community and culture, is essential for achieving environmental stewardship. Carefully selected experiences driven by rigorous academic learning standards, engendering discovery and wonder, and nurturing a sense of community will further connect students with their watershed, help reinforce an ethic of responsible citizenship, and promote academic achievement. Experiential learning techniques, such as those supported by the NOAA B-WET Program, have been shown to increase interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), thus contributing to NOAA's obligations under the America COMPETES Act (33 U.S.C. 893a(a)).

Contacts: Steve Drescher Policy Advisor Phone 301-713-0926

DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Environmental Remediation Science Program *NEW* DE-PS02-09ER09-07

Due Date for Applications: Apr 09, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: unknown Award Floor: unknown URL: http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do;jsessionid=JWWYhCwVk8DzbczJhhpGV2kcLGNtTGTqQJgCldRWG27PZc1jDTn2!1846437263?oppId=18713&flag2006=true&mode=VIEW

Overview: The Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), hereby announces interest in receiving applications for research grants in the Environmental Remediation Sciences Program (ERSP), which is within the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD) in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER). The ERSP seeks to advance fundamental science to understand, predict and mitigate the impacts of environmental contamination from past nuclear weapons production and provide a scientific basis for the long term stewardship of nuclear waste disposal. The program supports an integrated portfolio of research ranging from molecular to field scales with emphasis on the use of advanced computer models and multidisciplinary, iterative experimentation to understand and predict contaminant transport in complex subsurface environments. This mission is guided by the BER long term performance measure to provide sufficient scientific understanding such that DOE sites would be able to incorporate coupled physical, chemical and biological processes into decision making for environmental remediation and long-term stewardship. To meet this measure, BER funds basic research to investigate the key processes affecting the mobility of subsurface contaminants found at DOE sites. The goal of this solicitation is to support innovative, fundamental research to investigate the coupled physical, chemical, and biological processes affecting the transport of subsurface contaminants commonly found at DOE sites. Applications should identify critical knowledge gaps and address hypothesis-driven research to better understand the significant physical, chemical, and biological processes influencing the form and mobility of specific inorganic contaminants in the subsurface. Research projects should aim to provide the scientific basis for the long term stewardship of contaminated sites across the DOE complex and the development of new remediation concepts and strategies. Applications must include an explanation of how the proposed research supports the BER long term performance measure. The environment of interest is the terrestrial subsurface including the vadose zone, the saturated zone and key groundwater-surface water interfaces. The proposed research is expected to contribute to the public good by advancing the fundamental science associated with the cycling and transport of inorganic elements in the subsurface, and that benefit will be expressed through contributions to the technical literature. Listed below are the specific radionuclide and heavy metal Contaminants of Concern for this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) and an outline of the general science needs of the ERSP. Phytoremediation and the study of organic contaminants are NOT addressed in this FOA.

Contacts: Deborah Greenawalt Deb.Greenawalt@science.doe.gov

National Geothermal Database - DE-PS36-08GO98020

Due Date for Applications: January 29, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards:

Estimated Total Program Funding: Award Ceiling: $5,000,000 Award Floor: $0 URL: https://e-center.doe.gov/iips/faopor.nsf/UNID/3F4FF3A1108F2E758525750B0079E707?OpenDocument

Overview: This announcement has been amended to change the due to from February 3, 2009 to January 29, 2009. There are also changes made to the Phase I - Data Collection Plan and Database Proof of Concept , which are included on the Amendment 001 page. A link to the full Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is found by scrolling to the bottom of this page under the section Full Announcement and Other Files . Initial funding for this award is listed at $1,300,000 in FY 2009; with additional anticipated funds of $3,700,000 in FY 2010 through FY 2013 for a total of $5,000,000; subject to change and Congressional appropriations. Please see the entire FOA (link below) for detailed funding information. The role of renewable energy alternatives has become increasingly important to the national energy landscape as energy security and climate change dominate the U.S. energy policy debate. Geothermal energy has the potential to emerge as a capable alternative to conventional energy resources due to its renewable baseload capabilities, little to no carbon emissions, and affordability relative to other alternative energy technologies. In early 2008, DOE GTP initiated the Geothermal Risk Mitigation Strategies Report to analyze the risks involved with geothermal energy development, which can be found at the following link: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/pdfs/geothermal_risk_mitigation.pdf. The report proposed mitigation strategies to overcome barriers to development and enable additional investment in conventional and Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). As a result of the risk mitigation strategies proposed in the report, GTP is initiating an effort to create a web-based National Geothermal Database that will serve as a central repository for all publically accessible geothermal data. While domestic geothermal resource, power plant, and institutional barrier data (such as transmission infrastructure access, risk mitigation mechanisms, and policy information) is the primary focus of data gathering, international data sources may also be included when such knowledge would contribute to the development of domestic geothermal resources. This announcement is authorized under provisions of Energy Policy Act of 2005, Section 931(a)(2)(C). The National Geothermal Database will store critical geothermal site attribute information such as temperature at depth, seismicity/microseismicity, fracture maps, drilling data, permeability data, well logs, geophysical surveys, etc. The database should be inclusive of all types of geothermal resources such as hydrothermal, geopressured, Enhanced Geothermal Systems, geothermal fluids coproduced with oil and/or gas, etc. It should also utilize information from existing USGS geothermal resource assessments and DOE funded R D projects. This standardized set of geothermal resource data will be made available to the public and serve to focus geothermal exploration activities, thereby mitigating investment risks. It is expected that wherever possible the recipient will collaborate with private companies to gain access to historical drilling information. DOE envisions creating an expansive, useful, user-friendly database that will continue to operate beyond the project period, even after all DOE funds have been expended. Data will be organized such that criteria useful in assessing and identifying sites with the best geothermal resource potential can be defined. The will be organized using a set of common metrics for assessing and comparing geothermal resources and include a standard financial risk classification system in order to provide geothermal prospectors with information needed to make the most informed decisions possible on the potential for success at specific locations. Additionally, an interactive mapping capability is preferred as part of the database which will utilize user-friendly overlays of pertinent site criteria in three main areas geothermal resource, institutional barrier (i.e. transmission lines), and power plant data. GTP is seeking to award one cooperative agreement, for a five year period, on a competitive basis that addresses all items mentioned above. Funding for each subsequent phase beyond the first (as described below) will be conditional on a DOE stage gate review with positive determination that the next project phase may advance based on successful completion of the prior phase. Recipient cost share is not required, but is encouraged and may be used as a Program Policy Factor. Domestic applicants are eligible to apply including institutions of higher education, non-profit and for-profit private entities, State/Local Governments, and Indian tribes. Any of the previously mentioned entities, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs), and federal agencies will be allowed as subcontractors. Consortia of any of the groups listed previously will be given greater consideration. DOE envisions that the project will include the following phases, at a minimum: Phase I Data Collection Plan and Database Proof of Concept Phase II Database Prototype Phase III Working Database Establishment Phase IV Database Operation and Maintenance Please see the entire FOA, linked at the bottom of this page, for the complete description of work by phases and related requirements. Applications for this Funding Opportunity Announcement must be accessed, completed, and submitted through Grants.gov at http://www.grants.gov to be considered for award. Questions regarding the content of the announcement should be submitted through the Submit Question feature of the DOE Industry Interactive Procurement System (IIPS) at http://e-center.doe.gov. VERY IMPORTANT: To complete and submit applications through Grants.gov, there are several actions you must complete (e.g., obtain a Dun and Bradstreet Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, register with the Central Contract Registry (CCR), install the PureEdge Viewer, register with the credential provider, and register with Grants.gov). Applicants are highly encouraged to register as soon as possible and should allow at least 21 days to complete the registration process. When done, call the Grants.gov Helpdesk at 1-800-518-4726 to verify successful registration. Registration Instructions are found on the Grants.gov web site at http://www.grants.gov and in the Funding Opportunity Announcement. Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Compatibility: Grants.gov is currently incompatible with both the new Microsoft (MS) Vista Operating System and the new Microsoft (MS) Office 2007 versions of Word, Excel, and Power Point. In order to create and submit your application to Grants.gov, you must find a computer with a previous version Microsoft Operating System, such as Windows XP. If you attach a file created using MS Office 2007, you will not get an error message when you submit the application, HOWEVER, your entire application will not be able to be processed or accepted at Grants.gov and will not reach DOE. Grants.gov can accept applications with attachments created in MS Office 2007 if the attachments are saved in the prior format. See the http://www.grants.gov/assets/Vista_and_office_07_Compatibility.pdf for detailed instructions on how to do this. A file created in MS Office 2007 can be identified by the x at the end of the file extension, for example sample.docx for a Word file. Help Mode: It is important to complete all the required fields in accordance with the pop-up instructions on the Application forms. To activate the instructions, turn on the Help Mode (Icon with the pointer and question mark at the top of the form). Should you have questions regarding the operation of Grants.gov, please contact the Grants.gov Contact Center at support@grants.gov or 1-800-518-4726. Contact Center hours of operation are Monday - Friday from 7:00am to 9:00pm Eastern Standard Time.

Contacts: Genevieve Wozniak GO.Geothermal@go.doe.gov

Photovoltaic Supply Chain and Cross-Cutting Technologies DE-PS36-09GO99003

Due Date for Applications: January 28, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Estimated Total Program Funding: Award Ceiling: $3,000,000 Award Floor: $0 URL: http://e-center.doe.gov/iips/faopor.nsf/UNID/1522EB8DC134A7DC852575150078EFA7?OpenDocument

Overview: The purpose of this FOA is to identify and accelerate the development of unique products or processes that are expected to have a large impact on the solar photovoltaics (PV) industry, or a segment of the industry, in support of DOE Solar program goals. Successful applicants will focus on component and/or manufacturing technologies with the potential to have a near-term impact on a substantial segment of the PV industry. Near term is defined as technologies with expected market impacts evident within 2-6 years of award. Responsive applications will either 1) have a high impact on innovative evolutionary improvements that can be supplied across the industry at high volumes and lower costs than conventional technology today, or 2) propose disruptive technologies applicable to a narrow segment of the industry and which can dramatically reduce costs. If successful, either approach will drive future growth of the relevant technology or technologies. There will be two topic areas and three focus areas under each topic area. Topic 1 is a Proof of Concept Technical/Feasibility Assessment (POC/FA). Topic 2 is for Research, Development and Demonstration (RD D). The three focus areas are 1.) PV Module issues 2.) Non-Module PV system issues, and 3.) PV Manufacturing processes and metrologies. Applications for this Funding Opportunity Announcement must be accessed, completed, and submitted through Grants.gov at http://www.grants.gov, under this announcement, to be considered for award. Questions regarding the content of the announcement should be submitted through the Submit Question feature of the DOE Industry Interactive Procurement System, IIPS, at http://e-center.doe.gov. VERY IMPORTANT: To complete and submit applications through Grants.gov, there are several actions you must complete (e.g., obtain a Dun and Bradstreet Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, register with the Central Contract Registry (CCR), install the PureEdge Viewer, register with the credential provider, and register with Grants.gov). Applicants are highly encouraged to register as soon as possible and should allow at least 21 days to complete the registration process. When done, call the Grants.gov Helpdesk at 1.800.518.4726 to verify successful registration. Registration Instructions are found on the Grants.gov web site at http://www.grants.gov and in the Funding Opportunity Announcement. Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Compatibility: Grants.gov is currently incompatible with both the new Microsoft (MS) Vista Operating System and the new Microsoft (MS) Office 2007 versions of Word, Excel, and Power Point. In order to create and submit your application to Grants.gov, you must find and use a computer with a previous version Microsoft Operating System, such as Windows XP to upload your application. If you attach a file created using MS Office 2007, you will not get an error message when you submit the application, HOWEVER, your entire application will not be able to be processed or accepted at Grants.gov and will not reach DOE. Grants.gov can accept applications with attachments created in MS Office 2007 if the attachments are saved in the prior format. See the http://www.grants.gov/assets/Vista_and_office_07_Compatibility.pdf for detailed instructions on how to do this. A file created in MS Office 2007 can be identified by the x at the end of the file extension, for example, sample.docx, for a Word file. Contact Grants.gov at 1.800.518.4726 with any questions. Help Mode: It is important to complete all the required fields in accordance with the pop-up instructions on the Application forms. To activate the instructions, turn on the Help Mode (Icon with the pointer and question mark at the top of the form). Should you have questions regarding the operation of Grants.gov, please contact the Grants.gov Contact Center at support@grants.gov or 1-800-518-4726. Contact Center hours of operation are Monday - Friday from 7:00am to 9:00pm Eastern Standard Time.

Contacts: Andrea.Lucero@go.doe.gov

Annual Notice Submission of Renewal and Supplemental Applications for Office of Science Grants and Cooperative Agreements - DE-PS02-08ER08-02

Due Date for Applications: January 30, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: None Award Floor: None URL: http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&flag2006=true&oppId=18432

Overview: The Office of Science (SC) of the Department of Energy (DOE) hereby announces its continuing interest in receiving renewal and supplemental grant and cooperative agreement applications for support of work in the following program areas: Basic Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, and Planning and Analysis. An existing DOE project is a prerequisite.

Contacts: Your existing DOE technical program manager

Continuation of Solicitation for the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program - DE-PS02-08ER08-01

Due Date for Applications: January 30, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Estimated Total Program Funding: $400,000,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: https://e-center.doe.gov/iips/faopor.nsf/UNID/40E56992874167AC852573690049C661/$file/FOA_Notice_08-01.pdf

Overview: The Office of Science of the Department of Energy hereby announces its continuing interest in receiving grant applications for support of work in the following program areas: Basic Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, Advanced Scientific Computing, Fusion Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, and Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists. The following program descriptions are offered to provide more in-depth information on scientific and technical areas of interest to the Office of Science.

Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences The objective of this subprogram is to support fundamental research enabling the understanding of chemical transformations and energy flow in systems relevant to DOE missions. This knowledge serves as a basis for the development of new processes for the generation, storage, and use of energy and for mitigation of the environmental impacts of energy use. New experimental techniques are developed to investigate chemical processes and energy transfer over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales: from atomic to kilometer spatial scales and from femtosecond to millennia time scales. Theory, modeling, and computational simulations are performed, from detailed quantum calculations of chemical properties and reactivity to multi-scale simulations of combustion devices. The main research activities within the subprogram are fundamental interactions; photo- and biochemistry; and chemical transformations.

In fundamental interactions, basic research is supported in atomic, molecular and optical sciences; gas-phase chemical physics; ultrafast chemical science; and condensed phase and interfacial molecular science. Emphasis is placed on structural and dynamical studies of atoms, molecules, and nanostructures, and the description of their interactions in full quantum detail, with the aim of providing a complete understanding of reactive chemistry in the gas phase, condensed phase, and at interfaces. Novel sources of photons, electrons, and ions are used to probe and control atomic, molecular, and nanoscale matter. Ultrafast optical and x-ray techniques are developed and used to study chemical dynamics. There is a focus on cooperative phenomena in complex chemical systems, such as the effect of solvation on chemical structure, reactivity, and transport and the coupling of complex gas-phase chemistry with turbulent flow in combustion.

In photo- and biochemistry, including solar photochemistry, photosynthetic systems, and physical biosciences, research is supported on the molecular mechanisms involved in the capture of light energy and its conversion into chemical and electrical energy through biological and chemical pathways. Natural photosynthetic systems are studied to create robust artificial and bio-hybrid systems that exhibit the biological traits of self assembly, regulation, and self repair. Complementary research encompasses organic and inorganic photochemistry, photo-induced electron and energy transfer, photoelectrochemistry, and molecular assemblies for artificial photosynthesis. Inorganic and organic photochemical studies provide information on new chromophores, donor-acceptor complexes, and multi-electron photocatalytic cycles. Photoelectrochemical conversion is explored in studies of nanostructured semiconductors at liquid interfaces. Biological energy transduction systems are investigated, with an emphasis on the coupling of plant development and microbial biochemistry with the experimental and computational tools of the physical sciences.

In chemical transformations, the themes are characterization, control, and optimization of chemical transformations, including efforts in catalysis science; separations and analytical science; actinide chemistry; and geosciences. Catalysis science underpins the design of new catalytic methods for the clean and efficient production of fuels and chemicals and emphasizes inorganic and organic complexes; interfacial chemistry; nanostructured and supramolecular catalysts; photocatalysis and electrochemistry; and bio-inspired catalytic processes. Heavy element chemistry focuses on the spectroscopy, bonding, and reactivity of actinides and fission products; complementary research on chemical separations focuses on the use of nanoscale membranes and the development of novel metal-adduct complexes. Chemical analysis research emphasizes laser-based and ionization techniques for molecular detection, particularly the development of chemical imaging techniques. Geosciences research covers analytical and physical geochemistry, rock-fluid interactions, and flow/transport phenomena; this research provides a fundamental basis for understanding the environmental contaminant fate and transport and for predicting the performance of repositories for radioactive waste or carbon dioxide sequestration.

Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) The mission of the Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program is to deliver forefront computational and networking capabilities to enable scientists to extend the frontiers of science, answering critical questions that range from nanoscience to astrophysics and include nuclear structure, the function of living cells and the power of fusion energy. For example, two long term measures for the program are: • Demonstrate progress toward developing the mathematics, algorithms, and software that enable effective scientifically critical models of complex systems, including highly nonlinear or uncertain phenomena, or processes that interact on vastly different scales or contain both discrete and continuous elements. • Demonstrate progress toward developing, through the Genomes to Life partnership with the Biological and Environmental Research program, the computational science capability to model a complete microbe and a simple microbial community.

In order to accomplish this mission, the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program supports research in applied mathematics, computer science and networking. ASCR also operates Leadership Computing facilities, a high-performance production computing center, and a high-speed network to facilitate the analysis, modeling, simulation, and prediction of complex phenomena important to the Department of Energy.

The computing resources and the networks required to meet Office of Science needs exceed the state-of- the-art by a significant margin. Furthermore, the algorithms, software tools, the software libraries and the distributed software environments needed to accelerate scientific discovery through modeling and simulation are beyond the realm of commercial interest. To establish and maintain DOE's modeling and simulation leadership in scientific areas that are important to its mission, ASCR implements a broad base research portfolio in applied mathematics, computer science, and network research to underpin advances in mathematical methods, software tools, software libraries, software environments and networks needed to solve complex problems on computational resources that are on a trajectory to reach well beyond a petascale within a few years. Research areas of interest include:

(a) Applied Mathematics Research on the mathematical methods and numerical algorithms that enable the effective description, understanding, and prediction of complex physical, biological, and human-engineered systems. For example, the subjects of supported research efforts may include: (1) numerical methods for the parallel solution of systems of partial differential equations, large-scale linear or nonlinear systems, or very large parameter-estimation problems; (2) analytical or numerical techniques for modeling complex physical or biological phenomena, such as fluid turbulence or microbial populations; (3) analytical or numerical methods for bridging a broad range of temporal and spatial scales; (4) optimization, control, and risk analysis of complex systems, such as computer networks and electrical power grids; and (5) mathematical research issues related to petascale science.

(b) Computer Science Research in computer science to enable petascale scientific applications through advances in massively parallel computing such as scalable and fault tolerant operating systems, programming models, performance modeling and assessment tools, development tools, interoperability and infrastructure methodology, and large scale data management and visualization. The development of new computer and computational science techniques will allow scientists to use the most advanced computers without being overwhelmed by the complexity of rewriting their codes with each new generation of high performance architectures.

(c) Network Environment Research Research to develop and deploy a high-performance network and collaborative technologies to support distributed high-end science applications and large-scale scientific collaborations. The current focus areas include but are not limited to cyber security systems, dynamic bandwidth allocation services, network measurement and analysis, ultra high-speed transport protocols, and advanced application layer services that make it easy for scientists to effectively and efficiently access and use distributed resources, such as advanced services for group collaboration, secure services for remote access of distributed resources, and innovative technologies for sharing, controlling, and managing distributed computing resources.

(d) Broadening Participation and Collaboration Activities that develop innovative approaches for broadening and strengthening participation in applied mathematics, computer science, computational science and high performance computing.

Biological and Environmental Research Program For over 50 years the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Program has been investing in the biological and environmental sciences related to energy production. The BER program provides fundamental science to underpin the Department's strategic plan.

Specifically – Strategic Theme 3, Scientific Discovery & Innovation Strategic Goal 3.1, Scientific Breakthroughs: Achieve the major scientific discoveries that will drive U.S. competitiveness; inspire America; and revolutionize our approaches to the Nation’s energy, national security, and environmental quality challenges.

Strategic Goal 3.2, Foundations of Science: Deliver the scientific facilities, train the next generation of scientists and engineers, and provide the laboratory infrastructure required for U.S. scientific primacy. Through its support of peer-reviewed research at national laboratories, universities, and private institutions, the program develops the basic knowledge needed to address the following established indicators that the BER program is committed to, and progress can be measured against:

Life Sciences: Provide the fundamental scientific understanding of plants and microbes necessary to develop new robust and transformational basic research strategies for producing biofuels, cleaning up waste, and sequestering carbon.

Environmental Remediation: Provide sufficient scientific understanding such that DOE sites would be able to incorporate coupled physical, chemical and biological processes into decision making for environmental remediation and long-term stewardship.

Climate Change Research: Deliver improved scientific data and models about the potential response of the Earth’s climate and terrestrial biosphere to increased greenhouse gas levels for policy makers to determine safe levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. All grant applications should address one or more of these measures and/or explain how the proposed research supports the broad scientific objectives outlined above. More information on the program and the scientific research it supports can be found at our website http://www.science.doe.gov/ober/.

Contacts: Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Program Contact: Phone (301) 903-2046 Website: http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/Division.htm#chemical ACSR Program Contact: (301) 903-5800

Entrepreneur in Residence 2 *NEW* DE-PS36-08GO98041

Due Date for Applications: Jan 06, 2009 In order to meet programmatic requirements.

Expected Total Number of Awards:

Estimated Total Program Funding: Award Ceiling: $50,000 Award Floor: 50,000 URL: http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&flag2006=true&oppId=18575

Overview: A link to the full Funding Opportunity Announcement is found by scrolling to the bottom of this page. This is a restricted eligibility. In accordance with 10 CFR 600.6(b), eligibility for award is restricted to established venture capital firms. An established venture capital firm is defined as a domestic entity primarily engaged in acting as a principal (except investment bankers, securities dealers, and commodity contracts dealers) in buying or selling of financial contracts generally on a spread basis. Principals are investors that buy or sell for their own account. Eligible firms must certify that they have at least $5 million in funds available for energy efficiency and renewable energy technology investment, an overall current fund size of at least $50 million, a proven track record of launching successful start up businesses, and must demonstrate previous entrepreneurial support experience. DOE is seeking to partner with leading Venture Capital (VC) firms in a program to develop robust Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) projects at five of DOE s national laboratories Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The projects will identify and develop business cases to commercialize promising laboratory technology and give proven start-up entrepreneurs the opportunity to work directly with technical management and staff at a specified national laboratory to identify technologies that, when commercialized in start-up companies, will contribute to DOE s mission. Successful applicants will conduct technology assessments, identify market opportunities, formulate preliminary business cases, and propose business structures for start-up enterprises, as well as recommend policy and business practice modifications to DOE and the national laboratories to further refine their approaches to moving technology into the commercial sector. DOE is not obligated to provide additional funding toward the development of these technologies beyond what is set forth in this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). Applications for this Funding Opportunity Announcement must be accessed, completed, and submitted through Grants.gov at http://www.grants.gov to be considered for award. Questions regarding the content of the announcement should be submitted through the Submit Question feature of the DOE Industry Interactive Procurement System (IIPS) at http://e-center.doe.gov. VERY IMPORTANT: To complete and submit applications through Grants.gov, there are several actions you must complete (e.g., obtain a Dun and Bradstreet Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, register with the Central Contract Registry (CCR), install the PureEdge Viewer, register with the credential provider, and register with Grants.gov). Applicants are highly encouraged to register as soon as possible and should allow at least 21 days to complete the registration process. When done, call the Grants.gov Helpdesk at 1-800-518-4726 to verify successful registration. Registration Instructions are found on the Grants.gov web site at http://www.grants.gov and in the Funding Opportunity Announcement. Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Compatibility: Grants.gov is currently incompatible with both the new Microsoft (MS) Vista Operating System and the new Microsoft (MS) Office 2007 versions of Word, Excel, and Power Point. In order to create and submit your application to Grants.gov, you must find a computer with a previous version Microsoft Operating System, such as Windows XP. If you attach a file created using MS Office 2007, you will not get an error message when you submit the application, HOWEVER, your entire application will not be able to be processed or accepted at Grants.gov and will not reach DOE. Grants.gov can accept applications with attachments created in MS Office 2007 if the attachments are saved in the prior format. See the http://www.grants.gov/assets/Vista_and_office_07_Compatibility.pdf for detailed instructions on how to do this. A file created in MS Office 2007 can be identified by the x at the end of the file extension, for example sample.docx for a Word file. Help Mode: It is important to complete all the required fields in accordance with the pop-up instructions on the Application forms. To activate the instructions, turn on the Help Mode (Icon with the pointer and question mark at the top of the form). Should you have questions regarding the operation of Grants.gov, please contact the Grants.gov Contact Center at support@grants.gov or 1-800-518-4726. Contact Center hours of operation are Monday - Friday from 7:00am to 9:00pm Eastern Standard Time.

Contacts: Michael Schledorn EIR2@go.doe.gov

Environmental Remediation Science Program *NEW* DE-PS02-09ER09-07

Due Date for Applications: Apr 09, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown

Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: none Award Floor: none URL: http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&flag2006=true&oppId=18713

Overview: The Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), hereby announces interest in receiving applications for research grants in the Environmental Remediation Sciences Program (ERSP), which is within the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD) in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER). The ERSP seeks to advance fundamental science to understand, predict and mitigate the impacts of environmental contamination from past nuclear weapons production and provide a scientific basis for the long term stewardship of nuclear waste disposal. The program supports an integrated portfolio of research ranging from molecular to field scales with emphasis on the use of advanced computer models and multidisciplinary, iterative experimentation to understand and predict contaminant transport in complex subsurface environments. This mission is guided by the BER long term performance measure to provide sufficient scientific understanding such that DOE sites would be able to incorporate coupled physical, chemical and biological processes into decision making for environmental remediation and long-term stewardship. To meet this measure, BER funds basic research to investigate the key processes affecting the mobility of subsurface contaminants found at DOE sites. The goal of this solicitation is to support innovative, fundamental research to investigate the coupled physical, chemical, and biological processes affecting the transport of subsurface contaminants commonly found at DOE sites. Applications should identify critical knowledge gaps and address hypothesis-driven research to better understand the significant physical, chemical, and biological processes influencing the form and mobility of specific inorganic contaminants in the subsurface. Research projects should aim to provide the scientific basis for the long term stewardship of contaminated sites across the DOE complex and the development of new remediation concepts and strategies. Applications must include an explanation of how the proposed research supports the BER long term performance measure. The environment of interest is the terrestrial subsurface including the vadose zone, the saturated zone and key groundwater-surface water interfaces. The proposed research is expected to contribute to the public good by advancing the fundamental science associated with the cycling and transport of inorganic elements in the subsurface, and that benefit will be expressed through contributions to the technical literature. Listed below are the specific radionuclide and heavy metal Contaminants of Concern for this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) and an outline of the general science needs of the ERSP. Phytoremediation and the study of organic contaminants are NOT addressed in this FOA.

Contacts: Deborah Greenawalt 301-903-4074 Deb.Greenawalt@science.doe.gov

20% Wind by 2030: Overcoming the Challenges *NEW* DE-PS36-09GO99009

Due Date for Applications: Mar 03, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 29 Estimated Total Program Funding: $3,000,000 Award Ceiling: $500,000 Award Floor: $0 URL: https://e-center.doe.gov/iips/faopor.nsf/UNID/C53C9A2E58F125848525753000066191?OpenDocument

Overview: A link to the full Funding Opportunity Announcement is found by scrolling to the bottom of this page. The Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program (WHTP) contributes directly to the Department of Energy s mission of improving national, energy, and economic security and increasing the diversity of our Nation s energy resources. The WHTP s mission is to maximize renewable energy utilization in the United States by leading the Nation s research and development efforts to improve wind and water energy generation technology, in coordination with stakeholders, and to address barriers to the use of renewable energy. Fulfilling this mission will result in greater energy security and enhanced domestic economic benefit through more diverse, clean, reliable, affordable, and secure domestic electricity supplies. The Wind Energy Program has increased focus on near- to medium-term actions to significantly accelerate use of wind energy technologies, thus reducing the Nation s dependence on imported and environmentally damaging energy sources. The Program launched an effort, in collaboration with industry, to assess the potential for and impact of providing 20% of the Nation s electrical energy from wind technology. In May 2008, DOE issued the 20% Wind Energy by 2030 report. The report found that the Nation possesses affordable wind energy resources far in excess of those needed to enable a 20% scenario. However, major challenges need to be overcome and require action for 20% wind to be possible: " Investment in a national transmission system, so, for example, the power generated in Midwest locations can be delivered to urban centers on the east coast; " Larger electric load balancing areas are required, in tandem with better regional planning, so that regions can depend on a diversity of renewable generation sources; " Continued reduction in wind turbine capital costs through technology advancement and improved manufacturing capabilities; " Improved wind turbine performance and reduction of operating and maintenance costs through improved reliability; " Addressing concerns about local siting, wildlife, and environmental issues within the context of electricity generation. " Develop an abundant and skilled workforce to supply the growing renewable energy industry. Applications for this Funding Opportunity Announcement must be accessed, completed, and submitted through Grants.gov at http://www.grants.gov to be considered for award. Questions regarding the content of the announcement should be submitted through the Submit Question feature of the DOE Industry Interactive Procurement System (IIPS) at http://e-center.doe.gov. VERY IMPORTANT: To complete and submit applications through Grants.gov, there are several actions you must complete (e.g., obtain a Dun and Bradstreet Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, register with the Central Contract Registry (CCR), install the PureEdge Viewer, register with the credential provider, and register with Grants.gov). Applicants are highly encouraged to register as soon as possible and should allow at least 21 days to complete the registration process. When done, call the Grants.gov Helpdesk at 1-800-518-4726 to verify successful registration. Registration Instructions are found on the Grants.gov web site at http://www.grants.gov and in the Funding Opportunity Announcement. Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Compatibility: Grants.gov is currently incompatible with both the new Microsoft (MS) Vista Operating System and the new Microsoft (MS) Office 2007 versions of Word, Excel, and Power Point. In order to create and submit your application to Grants.gov, you must find a computer with a previous version Microsoft Operating System, such as Windows XP. If you attach a file created using MS Office 2007, you will not get an error message when you submit the application, HOWEVER, your entire application will not be able to be processed or accepted at Grants.gov and will not reach DOE. Grants.gov can accept applications with attachments created in MS Office 2007 if the attachments are saved in the prior format. See the http://www.grants.gov/assets/Vista_and_office_07_Compatibility.pdf for detailed instructions on how to do this. A file created in MS Office 2007 can be identified by the x at the end of the file extension, for example sample.docx for a Word file. Help Mode: It is important to complete all the required fields in accordance with the pop-up instructions on the Application forms. To activate the instructions, turn on the Help Mode (Icon with the pointer and question mark at the top of the form). Should you have questions regarding the operation of Grants.gov, please contact the Grants.gov Contact Center at support@grants.gov or 1-800-518-4726. Contact Center hours of operation are Monday - Friday from 7:00am to 9:00pm Eastern Standard Tim

Contacts: Sara Wilson sara.wilson@go.doe.gov 303-275-4922

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

GEOGRAPHIC, STATISTICAL, AND INDICATOR RESEARCH TO SUPPORT THE NATIONAL CONDITION SURVEYS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH PROGRAM *NEW*

EPA-ORD-09-WED29788

Due Date for Applications: Feb 20, 2009 Please refer to the full announcement, including Section IV for additional information on submission methods and due dates

Expected Total Number of Awards: 1

Estimated Total Program Funding: $1,500,000 Award Ceiling: $1,500,000 Award Floor: $190,000 URL: http://www.epa.gov/nheerl/about/files/EPA-ORD-09-WED29788.pdf

Overview: The U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is seeking applications proposing innovative approaches to determining how to employ the growing experience in conducting surveys of the ecological condition of freshwater systems (e.g., flowing waters, wetlands, and lakes) to the emerging need to include the value of ecosystem services in environmental decision-making. Services provided by ecosystems to humans include provisioning [e.g., providing water food, fuel, fiber]; support [soil fertility, nutrient cycling, pollination]; regulation [climate moderation, flood control]; cultural [economic, spiritual, and recreational benefits]; and preservation [biodiversity, renewable resources].) Methods for using indicators of and data on wetland condition to quantify the services provided by freshwater systems are vital if land managers, especially the states and tribes, are to ensure continued benefit from those services. The goal of this research is to develop relationships between measures of ecological condition to the delivery of ecosystem services by freshwater systems (e.g., flowing waters, wetlands, and lakes) that can be used in conjunction with surveys of ecological condition.

Contacts: Larry Hodgson, phone: (740) 261-5036 email: hodgson.larry@epa.gov

Integrated Design, Modeling, and Monitoring of Geologic Sequestration of Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide to Safeguard Sources of Drinking Water

EPA-G2008-STAR-H1

Due Date for Applications: January 6, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 4

Estimated Total Program Funding: $3,600,000 Award Ceiling: $900,000 Award Floor: URL: http://es.epa.gov/ncer/rfa/2008/2008_star_gsc02.html

Overview: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Science To Achieve Results (STAR) program, is seeking applications to conduct research to support the development of sound risk management strategies for the underground injection of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) in candidate subsurface geologic formations. To further the scientific understanding of this practice, research is needed to investigate how integrating approaches in design, siting, modeling and monitoring of CO2 in the subsurface can provide safe and effective storage, mitigate potential risks, and prevent endangerment of existing and potential sources of drinking water.

Contacts: Eligibility Contact: William Stelz (stelz.william@epa.gov); phone: 202-343-9802 Electronic Submissions: Ron Josephson (Josephson.Ron@epa.gov); phone: 202-343-9643 Technical Contact: Barbara Klieforth (klieforth.barbara@epa.gov); phone: 202-343-9266

NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION (NASA)

PROPOSAL OPPORTUNITY: SCIENCE EDUCATION AND PUBLIC OUTREACH FORUMS *READ OVERVIEW* NNH09ZDA004C

Due Date for Applications: unknown Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: unknown Award Floor: unknown URL: http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do;jsessionid=JWcRhpJLZxRFdj97vJp196GqCy7nn22ng0vvhVHfT4Q2yDvHhH4v!1846437263?oppId=44410&flag2006=false&mode=VIEW

Overview: On January 2, 2009, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Science Mission Directorate (SMD), is releasing a Cooperative Agreement Notice (NNH09ZDA004C) soliciting proposals for Science Education and Public Outreach Forums to collaborate with SMD in execution of its Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) program. The objective of the effort is to increase the overall coherence of the SMD E/PO program leading to more effective, sustainable, and efficient utilization of SMD science discoveries and learning experiences. It is anticipated that there will be a total of four awards with one Science Education and Public Outreach Forum (SEPOF) being individually affiliated with each of the four SMD Science Divisions: Astrophysics, Earth Science, Heliophysics, and Planetary Science. The areas to be addressed by this Cooperative Agreement include, but are not limited to, the following areas of collaboration: * E/PO Community Engagement and Development; * Division E/PO Product and Project Activity Analysis; and * SEPOF Coordination Committee Service. Proposals should clearly articulate an approach to the overall objective and to these areas of activity that extends the value of SMD investments in E/PO and contributes to NASAís education and outreach efforts. NASA anticipates making $3.5 M per year available for this selection. Awards will be for 5 years duration. Participation is open to all categories of domestic organizations, including industry, educational institutions, not-for-profit organizations, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, NASA Centers, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other Government agencies. Upon its release date, this Cooperative Agreement Notice will be available electronically from http://nspires.nasaprs.com/ (select "Solicitations" then select "Open Solicitations" then select " NNH09ZDA004C"). Notices of Intent (NOIs) are due February 11, 2009, and proposals are due April 9, 2009. Additional programmatic information can be obtained from: Dr. Larry P. Cooper, E/PO Program Officer, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546; Tel: (202) 358-1531; email: Larry.P.Cooper@nasa.gov.

Contacts: Dr. Larry P Cooper Larry.P.Cooper@nasa.gov

ROSES 2008: Ocean Salinity Science Team *NEW*

Due Date for Applications: Full Proposal - Mar 18, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary.do?method=init&solId={7A237BC8-9809-BB78-9C86-BB33ACF962C9}&path=open

Overview: NNH08ZDA001N, entitled "Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences - 2008 (ROSES-2008)," will be available on or about February 15, 2008, by opening the NASA Research Opportunities homepage at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/ and then linking through the menu listings "Solicitations" to "Open Solicitations." This NASA Research Announcement (NRA) solicits proposals for supporting basic and applied research and technology across a broad range of Earth and space science program elements relevant to one or more of the following NASA Research Programs: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Planetary Science, and Astrophysics. This ROSES NRA covers all aspects of basic and applied supporting research and technology in space and Earth sciences, including, but not limited to: theory, modeling, and analysis of SMD science data; aircraft, stratospheric balloon, and suborbital rocket investigations; development of experiment techniques suitable for future SMD space missions; development of concepts for future SMD space missions; development of advanced technologies relevant to SMD missions; development of techniques for and the laboratory analysis of both extraterrestrial samples returned by spacecraft, as well as terrestrial samples that support or otherwise help verify observations from SMD Earth system science missions; determination of atomic and composition parameters needed to analyze space data, as well as returned samples from the Earth or space; Earth surface observations and field campaigns that support SMD science missions; development of integrated Earth system models; development of systems for applying Earth science research data to societal needs; and development of applied information systems applicable to SMD objectives and data. Awards range from under $100K per year for focused, limited efforts (e.g., data analysis) to more than $1M per year for extensive activities (e.g., development of science experiment hardware). The funds available for awards in each program element offered in this NRA range from less than one to several million dollars, which allow selection from a few to as many as several dozen proposals depending on the program objectives and the submission of proposals of merit. Awards will be made as grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, and inter- or intra-agency transfers depending on the nature of the proposing organization and/or program requirements. The typical period of performance for an award is four years, although a few programs may specify shorter or longer periods. Participation is open to all categories of organizations, foreign and domestic, including educational institutions, industry, nonprofit organizations, NASA centers, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other Government agencies, without restriction on number or teaming arrangements. Note that it is NASA policy that all investigations involving non-U.S. organizations will be conducted on the basis of no exchange of funds. Proposal due dates are scheduled starting on May 9, 2008, and continue through March 27, 2009. Electronically submitted Notices of Intent to propose are requested for most program elements, with the first such due date being March 14, 2008. Electronic submission of proposals is required by the respective due dates for each program element and must be submitted by an authorized official of the proposing organization. Electronic proposals may be submitted via the NASA proposal data system NSPIRES or via Grants.gov. Every organization that intends to submit a proposal in response to this NRA must be registered with NSPIRES; organizations that intend to submit proposals via Grants.gov must also be registered with Grants.gov. Such registration must identify the authorized organizational representative(s) who will submit the electronic proposal. All principal investigators and other participants (e.g. co-investigators) must be registered in NSPIRES. Potential proposers and proposing organizations are urged to access the system(s) well in advance of the proposal due date(s) of interest to familiarize themselves with its structure and enter the requested information. Individual program elements under this solicitation may be found by using the Advanced Search method in Grants.gov (http://www.grants.gov/search/advanced.do). In the "Search by Funding Opportunity Number" box, enter the ROSES solicitation number of NNH08ZDA001N followed by an * (i.e., NNH08ZDA001N*). This will result in a list of all posted program elements. Use the funding number associated with the program element you wish to apply for to download the application package. Further information about specific program elements may be obtained from the individual Program Officers listed in the Summary of Key Information for each program element

Contacts: Dr. Max Bernstein, Senior Advisor for Research and Analysis, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546-0001; E-mail: sara@nasa.gov; Telephone: 202-358-0879.

ROSES 2008: Solar and Heliospheric Physics – NNH08ZDA001N-SHP

Due Date for Applications: Feb 06, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary.do?method=init&solId={7A237BC8-9809-BB78-9C86-BB33ACF962C9}&path=openhttp://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=143730/B.9%20SDO%20Science%20Center.pdf

Overview: NNH08ZDA001N, entitled "Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences - 2008 (ROSES-2008)," will be available on or about February 15, 2008, by opening the NASA Research Opportunities homepage at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/ and then linking through the menu listings "Solicitations" to "Open Solicitations." This NASA Research Announcement (NRA) solicits proposals for supporting basic and applied research and technology across a broad range of Earth and space science program elements relevant to one or more of the following NASA Research Programs: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Planetary Science, and Astrophysics. This ROSES NRA covers all aspects of basic and applied supporting research and technology in space and Earth sciences, including, but not limited to: theory, modeling, and analysis of SMD science data; aircraft, stratospheric balloon, and suborbital rocket investigations; development of experiment techniques suitable for future SMD space missions; development of concepts for future SMD space missions; development of advanced technologies relevant to SMD missions; development of techniques for and the laboratory analysis of both extraterrestrial samples returned by spacecraft, as well as terrestrial samples that support or otherwise help verify observations from SMD Earth system science missions; determination of atomic and composition parameters needed to analyze space data, as well as returned samples from the Earth or space; Earth surface observations and field campaigns that support SMD science missions; development of integrated Earth system models; development of systems for applying Earth science research data to societal needs; and development of applied information systems applicable to SMD objectives and data. Awards range from under $100K per year for focused, limited efforts (e.g., data analysis) to more than $1M per year for extensive activities (e.g., development of science experiment hardware). The funds available for awards in each program element offered in this NRA range from less than one to several million dollars, which allow selection from a few to as many as several dozen proposals depending on the program objectives and the submission of proposals of merit. Awards will be made as grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, and inter- or intra-agency transfers depending on the nature of the proposing organization and/or program requirements. The typical period of performance for an award is four years, although a few programs may specify shorter or longer periods. Participation is open to all categories of organizations, foreign and domestic, including educational institutions, industry, nonprofit organizations, NASA centers, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other Government agencies, without restriction on number or teaming arrangements. Note that it is NASA policy that all investigations involving non-U.S. organizations will be conducted on the basis of no exchange of funds. Proposal due dates are scheduled starting on May 9, 2008, and continue through March 27, 2009. Electronically submitted Notices of Intent to propose are requested for most program elements, with the first such due date being March 14, 2008. Electronic submission of proposals is required by the respective due dates for each program element and must be submitted by an authorized official of the proposing organization. Electronic proposals may be submitted via the NASA proposal data system NSPIRES or via Grants.gov. Every organization that intends to submit a proposal in response to this NRA must be registered with NSPIRES; organizations that intend to submit proposals via Grants.gov must also be registered with Grants.gov. Such registration must identify the authorized organizational representative(s) who will submit the electronic proposal. All principal investigators and other participants (e.g. co-investigators) must be registered in NSPIRES. Potential proposers and proposing organizations are urged to access the system(s) well in advance of the proposal due date(s) of interest to familiarize themselves with its structure and enter the requested information. Individual program elements under this solicitation may be found by using the Advanced Search method in Grants.gov (http://www.grants.gov/search/advanced.do). In the "Search by Funding Opportunity Number" box, enter the ROSES solicitation number of NNH08ZDA001N followed by an * (i.e., NNH08ZDA001N*). This will result in a list of all posted program elements. Use the funding number associated with the program element you wish to apply for to download the application package. Further information about specific program elements may be obtained from the individual Program Officers listed in the Summary of Key Information for each program element in this NRA, while questions concerning general NRA policies and procedures may be directed to Dr. Max Bernstein, Senior Advisor for Rese

Contacts: Dr. Max Bernstein, Senior Advisor for Research and Analysis, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546-0001; E-mail: sara@nasa.gov; Telephone: 202-358-087

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NSF)

Aeronomy - PD 98-1521 Due Date for Applications: Accepted Any Time

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=11686&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund

Overview: The Aeronomy program supports research on upper and middle atmosphere phenomena of ionization, recombination, chemical reaction, photo emission, and transport; the transport of energy, and momentum. This program also supports research into mass in the mesosphere-thermosphere-ionosphere system including the processes involved and the coupling of this global system to the stratosphere below and magnetosphere above and the plasma physics of phenomena manifested in the coupled ionosphere-magnetosphere system, including the effects of high-power radio wave modification.

About the Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Program The CEDAR concept originated in the mideighties and was developed over several years through workshops, symposia, and committee deliberations by nearly 100 scientists involved in aeronomical studies. These activities led to a comprehensive report that provided a framework for developing upper atmospheric research in the United States through an evolutionary strategy of instrument development and deployment coordinated with campaign activities related to the global scale, coupled, near earth environment. The program has attracted a large number of graduate students and many international collaborators. Guidance is provided by a science steering committee appointed by the NSF Aeronomy and Upper Atmospheric Facilities program directors; scientific feedback to the community is provided by newsletters and an annual summer workshop.

Contacts: Cassandra Fesen; Email: cfesen@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8529

Alliances for Broadening Participation in STEM (ABP) Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP), Bridge to the Doctorate (LSAMP-BD), Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Program Solicitation 09-515

Due Date for Applications: Full Proposal Deadline(s) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time):

    February 20, 2009
    Third Friday in February, Annually Thereafter
     LSAMP Bridge to the Doctorate
    February 24, 2009
     Innovation through Institutional Integration
    August 25, 2009
     Innovation through Institutional Integration
    October 09, 2009
    Second Friday in October, Annually Thereafter
     Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation
    October 09, 2009
    Second Friday in October, Annually Thereafter
     LSAMP Educational Research Projects

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09515/nsf09515.htm

Overview: The Alliances for Broadening Participation in STEM (ABP) solicitation includes the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, Bridge to the Doctorate (LSAMP-BD) Activity, and the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program. This portfolio of programs seek to increase the number of students successfully completing quality degree programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Particular emphasis is placed on transforming STEM education through innovative academic strategies and experiences in support of groups that historically have been underrepresented in STEM disciplines: African-Americans, Alaskan Natives, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Pacific Islanders. Managed synergistically, the ABP cluster enables seamless transitions from the STEM baccalaureate to attainment of the doctorate and entry to the STEM professoriate. ABP support begins at the baccalaureate level through the LSAMP program. LSAMP emphasizes development of broad based regional and national alliances of academic institutions, school districts, state and local governments, and the private sector to increase the diversity and quality of the STEM workforce. Eligible LSAMP undergraduate students may receive continued support for up to two additional years of STEM graduate study through the Bridge to the Doctorate (BD) Activity. The Bridge to the Doctorate provides significant financial support for matriculating candidates in STEM graduate programs at eligible alliance sites. Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) furthers the graduate education of underrepresented STEM students through the doctorate level, preparing them for fulfilling opportunities and productive careers as STEM faculty and research professionals. AGEP also supports the transformation of institutional culture to attract and retain STEM doctoral students into the professorate. Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) projects enable faculty, administrators, and others in institutions to think and act strategically about the creative integration of NSF-funded awards, with particular emphasis on awards managed through programs in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), but not limited to those awards. For Fiscal Year 2009, proposals are being solicited in nine EHR programs that advance I3 goals: CREST, GSE, HBCU-UP, ITEST, LSAMP, MSP, Noyce, RDE

• Contacts: A. James Hicks, Program Director, LSAMP, BD, 815 N, telephone: (703) 292-8640, fax: (703) 292-9019, email: ahicks@nsf.gov
• Harry Bass, Program Director, LSAMP, BD, 815, telephone: (703) 292-8447, fax: (703) 292-9018, email: hbass@nsf.gov
• Martha James, Assistant Program Director, LSAMP, BD, 815, telephone: (703) 292-7772, fax: (703) 292-9018, email: mjames@nsf.gov

Assembling the Tree of Life *UPDATED* NSF 09-522 Due Date for Applications: Mar 23, 2009 Full Proposal Deadline(s): March 23, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 6

Estimated Total Program Funding: $12,000,000 Award Ceiling: unknown Award Floor: unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf09522

Overview: A flood of new information, from whole-genome sequences to detailed structural information to inventories of earth's biota to greater appreciation of the importance of lateral gene transfer in shaping evolutionary history, is transforming 21st century biology. Along with comparative data on morphology, fossils, development, behavior, and interactions of all forms of life on earth, these new data streams make even more critical the need for an organizing evolutionary context. Phylogeny, the genealogical map for all lineages of life on earth, provides an overall framework to facilitate biological information retrieval, prediction and analysis. Currently, single investigators or small teams of researchers are studying the evolutionary pathways of heredity usually concentrating on taxonomic groups of modest size. Assembly of a framework phylogeny, or Tree of Life, for all 1.7 million described species requires a greatly magnified effort, often involving large teams working across institutions and disciplines. This is the overall goal of the Assembling the Tree of Life activity. The National Science Foundation announces its intention to continue support of creative and innovative research that will resolve evolutionary relationships for large groups of organisms throughout the history of life. Investigators also will be supported for projects in data acquisition, analysis, algorithm development and dissemination in computational phylogenetics and phyloinformatics.

Contacts: Maureen Kearney, 635N, telephone: (703) 292-7187, email:

    mkearney@nsf.gov

Atmospheric Chemistry – PD 98-1524

Due Date for Applications – Accepted Any Time

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=11692&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund

Overview: Supports research to measure and model the concentration and distribution of gases and aerosols in the lower and middle atmosphere. Also supports research on the chemical reactions among atmospheric species; the sources and sinks of important trace gases and aerosols; the aqueous-phase atmospheric chemistry; the transport of gases and aerosols throughout the atmosphere; and the improved methods for measuring the concentrations of trace species and their fluxes into and out of the atmosphere.

Contacts: Eric Hintsa; email: ehintsa@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8522 John E. Mak; email: jmak@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8524

Biological Oceanography – PD 98-1650 Due Date for Applications: August 15, 2008; February 15, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=11696

Overview: The Biological Oceanography Program supports research in marine ecology broadly defined: relationships among marine organisms and their interactions with the environment of the oceans or Great Lakes. Projects submitted to the program for consideration are often interdisciplinary efforts that may include participation by other OCE Programs.

Projects that fall within the purview of the Program may focus on environments ranging from estuarine and coastal systems to the deep sea, and also including studies in the Great Lakes. Research areas include ecosystem processes; community and population ecology; behavioral, reproductive and life history ecology; physiological and chemical ecology; and evolutionary ecology. Inter-disciplinary projects are particularly encouraged.

Contacts: David L. Garrison; email: dgarriso@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8582 Cynthia Suchman; email: csuchman@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8143 Ajit Subramaniam; email: asubrama@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-7592 Gayle Pugh; email: gpugh@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8582 Pamela Shaw; email: pshaw@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-7598

Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) – NSF 07-548 Due Date for Applications: May 20, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 15 Estimated Total Program Funding: $14,000,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07548/nsf07548.pdf

Overview: The Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program aims to significantly increase the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents receiving post secondary degrees in the computing disciplines, with an emphasis on students from communities with longstanding under-representation in computing: women, persons with disabilities, and minorities. Included minorities are African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. The BPC program seeks to engage the computing community in developing and implementing innovative methods to improve recruitment and retention of these students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Because the lack of role models in the professoriate can be a barrier to participation, the BPC program also aims to develop effective strategies for encouraging individuals to pursue academic careers in computing and become these role models.

There are three components to the BPC program:

Alliances. Broad Alliances of institutions and organizations will design and carry out comprehensive programs that address underrepresentation in the computing disciplines. Alliances will join academic institutions of higher learning with secondary (and possibly middle) schools, government, industry, professional societies, and other not-for-profit organizations. In most cases, Alliances will involve multiple academic institutions of higher learning. Together, the participants will (1) develop and implement interventions that support students, (2) create sustainable changes in culture and practices at the institutional, departmental, and organizational levels, and (3) serve as models and repositories for effective practices to broaden participation. The emphasis will be on activities that have significant impact both in the quality of opportunities afforded to students and in the number of students potentially served. While the focus is on implementations, an Alliance may include complementary research that informs the design of its activities. The leveraging of existing efforts both across and within the underrpresented communities is strongly encouraged.

Alliance Extensions. Successful BPC Alliances can propose additional funding to significantly expand the impact of their work. The new funding can overlap with the final year of the Alliance project and can extend it for up to two years. Extensions must increase not just the duration of the Alliance award but also its scope, introducing additional targeted student groups, partners, and/or projects.

Demonstration Projects. Demonstration Projects (DPs) are smaller in scope and narrower in focus than Alliance projects. Typically DPs will be pilots of innovative programs that, once fully developed, could be incorporated into the activities of an Alliance. Projects might, for example, be proposed by a single institution or might focus on a specific underrepresented community, a specific point in the academic pipeline, or on a specific impediment to full participation in computing. As in the case of Alliances, complementary, well-defined research aimed at informing the development of the project can be included.

Contacts: Janice Cuny, Program Director, Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Division of Computer and Network Systems, 1175 N, telephone: (703) 292-8950, fax: (703) 292-9010, email: jcuny@nsf.gov

Harriet G. Taylor, Program Manager, Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Division of Computer and Network Systems, 1175 N, telephone: (703) 292-8950, fax: (703) 292-9010, email: htaylor@nsf.gov

CEDAR, GEM, and SHINE Postdoctoral Research – NSF 06-584 Due Date for Applications: February 2, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 3-6 each year Estimated Total Program Funding: $320,000 Award Ceiling: $80,000 Award Floor: $80,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06584/nsf06584.pdf

Overview: The CEDAR, GEM, and SHINE programs are all broad-based, community-initiated research programs dealing with special regions of Earth's space environment. Each of these three programs has its own NSF Program Solicitation and each has its own web page hosted at one of the research institutions involved. Postdoctoral researchers interested in submitting a proposal in response to this Program Solicitation should also examine these other program solicitations and web sites for more details on the CEDAR, GEM and SHINE programs. Awards made under this Program Solicitation will be for research appropriate to one (or more) of the CEDAR, GEM, and SHINE programs. Proposals for cross-cutting research that would be appropriate for two or all three of the CEDAR, GEM, and SHINE programs are encouraged.

The primary goal of this program is to provide a mechanism for the support of young researchers to pursue research goals (related to the areas described above) of their own devising. Because of the special nature of these awards, there are special rules for the preparation of the proposals, the budgets and the review process (see below for details).

Contacts: Kile B.Baker; telephone: (703) 292-8519; email: kbaker@nsf.gov Paul Bellaire; telephone: (703) 292-8519; email: pbellair@nsf.gov Robert Robinson; telephone: (703) 292-8519; email: rmrobins@nsf.gov

CISE Cross-Cutting Programs: FY 2009 and FY 2010 – NSF 08-578

Due Date for Applications: Dec 17, 2008 Submission Window Dates Medium Projects Oct 01 - Oct 31, 2008 Aug 1 - Aug 31, Annually Thereafter Large Projects Nov 01 - Nov 28, 2008, Nov 1 - Nov 28, Annually Thereafter Small Projects Dec 01 - Dec 17, 2008, Dec 1 - Dec 17, Annually Thereafter

Expected Total Number of Awards: 80-110 Estimated Total Program Funding: $75,000,000 Award Ceiling: $3,000,000 Award Floor: $50,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08578/nsf08578.pdf

Overview: The three cross-cutting programs are defined below.

Data-Intensive Computing Enormous digital datasets abound in all facets of our lives - in e-commerce, in World Wide Web information resources, and in many realms of science and engineering. Looking ahead, the pace of data production will only accelerate with increasing digitization of communication and entertainment and the continuing assimilation of computing into everyday life. Data will arise from many sources, will require complex processing, may be highly dynamic, be subject to high demand, and be of importance in a range of end-use tasks. The broad availability of data coupled with increased capabilities and decreased costs of both storage and computing technologies has led to a rethinking of how we solve problems that were previously impractical or, in some cases, even impossible to solve. Further, despite the continuing advances and decreasing costs of computing and storage technologies, data production and collection are outstripping our ability to process and store data. This compels us to rethink how we will manage – store, retrieve, explore, analyze, and communicate – this abundance of data.

These technical and social drivers have increased the urgent need to support computation on data of far larger scales than ever previously contemplated. Data-intensive computing is at the forefront of ultra-large-scale commercial data processing, and industry has taken the lead in creating data-centers comprised of myriad servers storing petabytes of data to support their business objectives and to provide services at Internet-scale. Such data centers are instances of data-intensive computing environments, the target of this solicitation. For data-intensive computing, massive data is the dominant issue with emphasis placed on the data-intensive nature of the computation.

Data intensive computing demands a fundamentally different set of principles than mainstream computing. Many data-intensive applications admit to large-scale parallelism over the data and are well-suited to specifications via high-level programming primitives in which the run-time system manages parallelism and data access. The increasingly capacious and economical storage technologies greatly change the role that storage plays in such large-scale computing. Many data-intensive applications also require extremely high degrees of fault-tolerance, reliability, and availability. Applications also often face real-time responsiveness requirements and must confront heterogeneous data types and noise and uncertainty in the data. Scale will impact a system’s ability to retrieve new and updated data and to provide, whenever appropriate, guarantees of integrity and availability as part of the system’s basic functionality in the face of varying levels of uncertainty.

The Data-Intensive Computing program seeks to increase our understanding of the capabilities and limitations of data-intensive computing. How can we best program data-intensive computing platforms to exploit massive parallelism and to serve best the varied tasks that may be executed on them? How can we express high-level parallelism at this scale in a natural way for users? What new programming abstractions (including models, languages and algorithms) can accentuate these fundamental capabilities? How can data-intensive computing platforms be designed to support extremely high levels of reliability, efficiency, and availability? How can they be designed in ways that reflect desirable resource sensibilities, such as in power consumption, human maintainability, environmental footprint, and economic feasibility? What (new) applications can best exploit this computing paradigm, and how must this computing paradigm evolve to best support the data-intensive applications we may seek? These are examples of questions that at their core ask how we can support data-intensive computing when the volume of data surpasses the capabilities of the computing and storage technologies that underlie them.

The program will fund projects in all areas of computer and information science and engineering that increase our ability to build and use data-intensive computing systems and applications, help us understand their limitations, and create a knowledgeable workforce capable of operating and using these systems as they increasingly become a major force in our economy and society.

Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) In the past decade, our network infrastructure has undergone radical changes. It has evolved from a small number of interconnected computer networks to a global socio-technical infrastructure, where people communicate and interact spontaneously in cyber space and with the cyber physical world, create content and share knowledge over a network of heterogeneous networks. In the future, global society will increasingly rely on socio-technical networks designed in harmony with societal values and economic viability, with enhanced security, privacy, resilience, availability and manageability, and the ability to incorporate as yet unforeseen technologies, applications and services.

The Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) program encourages members of all network science and engineering communities to engage in integrative thinking to advance, seed and sustain the transformation of networking research to enable the socio-technical networks of the future. The focus is on innovative research efforts that address new or as yet unsolved critical network challenges that by their nature require expertise and synergy from different areas of computing, as well as other relevant fields such as engineering, mathematics, economics, and the social sciences.

The NetSE program seeks proposals focused on developing new theoretical foundations, principles and methodologies to understand and reason about the dynamics and behavior of current and future large-scale networks, the interdependence among the physical, informational and social networks they embody, and the tradeoffs among communication, computation and storage. Of interest are also new models that can inform the development of information systems and the networking and communications technologies that underlie them, and give coherence to the highly diverse ways users might access information in the future.

NetSE also subsumes the programmatic area known as FIND, which explores radical future innovations in network design to meet the requirements of future socio-technical networks. The focus is on "clean slate", multi-disciplinary approaches, unconstrained by the current Internet. This undertaking requires rethinking network functions and design strategies, in the context of a range of scientific, technical and social challenges and opportunities. The emphasis is on creating theoretically grounded architectures that address fundamental policy and design engineering trade-offs, support healthy economic models and promote social benefits.

Network architecture and protocol design challenges also arise when seeking discovery, invocation and composition of globally distributed, highly evolving services and information systems designed for networks of extreme heterogeneity and complexity. Consequently, the program will support the exploration of new frameworks and methodologies that support internet-scale, topologically-aware models of computation and autonomous computational agents, and new approaches for providing timely and coherent access to information when the magnitude and speed of the information flow dwarfs our ability to transport, process, or comprehend it directly. New paradigms and frameworks are also of interest, to enable new applications that provide information based on both content and context and to improve or enable existing or new classes of applications, such gaming, virtual worlds, augmented reality and tele-presence.

Imbued with cognitive capabilities and context-awareness, pervasive systems are increasingly and inextricably permeating the fabric of our society with great potential for richer social and economic experiences and an improved quality of life. Many NetSE challenges, however, stand between our current state and a full realization of environment, situation and human aware pervasive networked systems. The NetSE program will support research on new paradigms, guiding principles, innovative models and sound methodologies for acquiring and seamlessly embedding relevant context information into the network architecture, protocols and services to support reliable and predictable pervasive systems and applications with different quality of service requirements or unique characteristics, such as mobility and energy constraints, and in contexts where applications may require proactive and timely action.

The NetSE program seeks broad, interdisciplinary advances in network science and engineering, and thus anticipates that successful projects with multiple investigators will typically need to bring together a team of people with different, complementary expertise, and single-investigator proposals will need to show that the investigator has expertise in two or more CISE-related areas, appropriate for the projects proposed. Research in NetSE is expected to have an assessment plan that might include, for example, formal verification, simulation, modeling, proof-of-concept development, prototype testing on a testbed, or, when applicable, usability evaluation involving human subjects.

Trustworthy Computing The Trustworthy Computing program envisions a future in which our increasingly ubiquitous and distributed computing and communication systems deliver the quality of service they are designed to achieve, without disruption, while enabling and preserving privacy, security and trust. The program supports research and education activities that explore novel frameworks, theories, and approaches towards realizing a trustworthy computing future, recognizing that a number of intertwined scientific, technological and sociological challenges must be overcome to do so. The program will support projects that strengthen the scientific foundations of trustworthiness, in order to inform the creation of new trustworthy technologies. We especially seek new models, logics, algorithms, and theories for analyzing and reasoning about all aspects of trustworthiness-- reliability, security, privacy, and usability-- about all components and their composition. Building on its predecessor program Cyber Trust, the Trustworthy Computing program will also continue to support projects that explore the fundamentals of cryptography, that examine and strengthen security weaknesses in current algorithms or protocols, and that explore new computing models that promise to improve trustworthiness or our reasoning about it. A trustworthy system depends on its building blocks and their interoperability. These building blocks range from hardware processes, possibly with new features to support trustworthiness, to network protocols and system software, to applications software. While today many researchers focus on one of the many building blocks that comprise our systems, the Trustworthy Computing program encourages investigators to explore research opportunities directed towards integrating these building blocks through new security architectures, with emphasis on those that are generic but also including those that are application-specific.

As computing systems have begun to pervade every aspect of daily life, people need to be able to trust them—so much of their lives depend on them. The Trustworthy Computing program seeks proposals to provide scientific and technological perspectives on privacy and usability. Threats to citizens’ privacy arise in many sectors of daily life, e.g., health, financial, and e-commerce, and assuring privacy is essential to the foundations of democracy, e.g., voting and the freedom of speech. The program will support the exploration of new scientific methodologies and technologies to state, reason about, and resolve conflicts among privacy policies, and between privacy and security policies. Further, we need new models, methods, algorithms, and tools to safeguard the information of individuals wherever it may digitally reside. The Trustworthy Computing program also seeks proposals focused on usability. Incorporating trustworthiness into a system should not place undue demands on human users or impact human or system performance. People are often the weakest link in security. How can we make it easy and enjoyable for people to use computing systems yet still protect them from unforeseeable attacks on their security and privacy? The needs of users are many, and include being informed of threats and breaches, to managing the appropriate dissemination of personal information on social networks, to controlling access to information that may be harmful to minors. System design for usability in different contexts demands new approaches to integrating and balancing among different functionalities, understanding human perception of trust including privacy, informing users of potential pitfalls, and predicting the potential consequences of user decisions.

Understanding the interplay between people and technology is also essential, for trustworthiness cannot be assured through technological innovation alone. Consequently, the Trustworthy Computing program will support multidisciplinary research proposals that consider both the social and technical dimensions of created a trustworthy computing future, recognizing that such research must be undertaken in a context that considers regulatory and legal implications. If we are to make progress toward realizing a trustworthy computing future, we must characterize trustworthiness and the many different classes of threats. While current solutions largely focus on known security threats, the Trustworthy Computing program seeks proposals aimed at characterizing future threats too, where such threats may be driven by adversarial motives that are yet to be identified or understood. Methods must be developed to evaluate systems for trustworthiness, so that they can be confidently used. Evaluation may include a combination of methods that involve analytical reasoning, simulation, experimental deployment and, where possible, deployment on live systems. New technology is required, such as testbeds and methodologies that enable system experimentation at scale without exposing operational systems to threats, such as those that may be unintentionally introduced by trustworthiness enhancements. Metrics must be developed that can confidently predict system trustworthiness based on realistic assumptions of the capabilities of adversaries, and they must be measurable or amenable to reasoning. Requirements for trustworthiness must be defined, so that they inform the effective design of trustworthy computing and communications systems.

Contacts: Jim French; Data-intensive Computing Program; telephone: (703) 292-8930; email: jfrench@nsf.gov Darleen L. Fisher; Network Science and Engineering Program; telephone: (703) 292-8950; email: dlfisher@nsf.gov Karl Levitt; Trustworthy Computing Program; telephone: (703) 292-8950; email: klevitt@nsf.gov

Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics – PD06-5740 Due Date for Applications: Accepted Any Time

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=11699

Overview: The goals of the Program are to: (i) advance knowledge about the processes that force and regulate the atmosphere’s synoptic and planetary circulation, weather and climate, and (ii) sustain the pool of human resources required for excellence in synoptic and global atmospheric dynamics and climate research.

Research topics include theoretical, observational and modeling studies of the general circulation of the stratosphere and troposphere; synoptic scale weather phenomena; processes that govern climate; the causes of climate variability and change; methods to predict climate variations; extended weather and climate predictability; development and testing of parameterization of physical processes; numerical methods for use in large-scale weather and climate models; the assembly and analysis of instrumental and/or modeled weather and climate data; data assimilation studies; development and use of climate models to diagnose and simulate climate and its variations and change.

Some Climate and Large Scale Dynamics (CLD) proposals address multidisciplinary problems and are often co-reviewed with other NSF programs, some of which, unlike CLD, use panels in addition to mail reviewers, and thus have target dates or deadlines. Proposed research that spans in substantive ways topics appropriate to programs in other divisions at NSF, e.g., ocean sciences, ecological sciences, hydrological sciences, geography and regional sciences, applied math and statistics, etc., must be submitted at times consistent with target dates or deadlines established by those programs.

Contacts: Jay S. Fein; email: jfein@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8527 Walter Robinson; email: warobins@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8527 Liming Zhou; email: lzhou@nsf.gov; Telephone: (703) 292-8527

Communicating Research to Public Audiences – 03-509 Due Date for Applications: Accepted any time

Expected Total Number of Awards: 20/year Estimated Total Program Funding: $1,500,000 (depending on availability of funds) Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03509/nsf03509.pdf

Overview: The purpose of Communicating Research to Public Audiences grants is to promote the discovery, integration, dissemination, and employment of new knowledge in service to society and to achieve excellence in U.S. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at all levels. These grants will provide an opportunity for Principal Investigators (PIs) to explain in non-technical terms the methods and/or results of their research to a broad and diverse audience. Communicating Research to Public Audiences (NSF 03-509) replaces Supplements to Active Research Awards (NSF 97-70).

Projects with funding levels up to $75,000 will be supported to communicate the processes and results of current research awards from any NSF directorate or the Office of Polar Programs to public audiences in order to assist in the broader dissemination of research results and to promote science and technological literacy for the general public in an out-of-school setting. The grant can be used for any activity that falls within the definition of an informal science education activity such as media presentations, exhibits, or youth-based activities, in order to disseminate research results, research in progress, or research methods.

• • Must have an active NSF award to be eligible.

Contacts: Alphonse T. Desena; telephone: (703) 292-5106; email: adesena@nsf.gov Sylvia M. James; telephone: (703) 292-5333; email: sjames@nsf.gov

Valentine H. Kass; telephone: (703) 292-5095; email: vkass@nsf.gov Sandra H. Welch; telephone: (703) 292-5094; email: swelch@nsf.gov

Computer and Network Systems (CNS): Core Programs – NSF 08-576 Due Date for Applications: Dec 17, 2008 Submission Window Date(s) Medium Projects Oct 01 - Oct 31, 2008 Aug 1 - Aug 31, Annually Thereafter Large Projects Nov 01 - Nov 28, 2008, Nov 1 - Nov 28, Annually Thereafter Small Projects Dec 01 - Dec 17, 2008, Dec 1 - Dec 17, Annually Thereafter

Expected Total Number of Awards: 260 Estimated Total Program Funding: $60,000,000 Award Ceiling: $3,000,000 Award Floor: $50,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08577pdf

Overview: CNS supports two core programs as described below.

Computer Systems Research (CSR) Advances in software and hardware technologies are expanding the frontiers of distributed computing along multiple dimensions. Progress in Internet technologies is revolutionizing the use and scale of distributed systems, ushering in a variety of applications, such as Web search, e-commerce, social networking, distributed virtual environments, and utility computing. Advances in handheld and embedded device technology, coupled with progress in wireless communications and mobile computing, have led to the emergence of pervasive and ubiquitous computing where technology is increasingly invisible and where access to information and services is provided unobtrusively anytime, anywhere. Recent advances in multi-core architectures is enabling new levels of parallelism, never seen before in mainstream computing, with potential for significant performance gains without exacerbating the problems of power dissipation and design complexity. The Computer Systems Research (CSR) program supports the exploration of the new frontiers of computer systems and software, focusing on systems research that explores novel ideas and expands the limits of existing paradigms, with potential for significant advances in scientific or technical understanding of future computing systems and applications.

Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) Future networks should be available anytime and anywhere, be accessible from any communication device, require little or no management overhead, be resilient to failures and malicious attacks, and be trustworthy for all types of communication. They must be able to evolve over time to incorporate new technologies, support new classes of applications, and meet new requirements and challenges. They also need to accommodate growth and unforeseen changes across many dimensions, including traffic load, network size and topology, physical link characteristics, different types of applications, and heterogeneity, without significant performance degradation.

Contacts: Darleen Fisher; email: dlfisher@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8950 Krishna Kant; email: kkant@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-4776

Continental Dynamics – NSF 04-512

Due Date for Applications: Preliminary Proposal, April 1 annually Full Proposal, November 15 annually

Expected Total Number of Awards: 20-30 Estimated Total Program Funding: $10,250,000 (in FY 04 & similar in subsequent years) Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04512/nsf04512.pdf

Overview: An effective organizational schema for the mobilization of scientific creativity and project implementation for continental dynamics research involves the concept of a field laboratory. Each field area would become an outdoor laboratory, in which techniques such as sampling, mapping, geophysical studies, and drilling are combined, over a number of years and a number of investigators. Data and samples that originate in the field laboratory then go indoors where many participating investigators engaged in sample analysis, computer modeling, and data processing work together to develop quantitative synthesis. In this context, research projects supported by the Continental Dynamics Program will normally be characterized by many of the following criteria:

• Be interdisciplinary, requiring coordination of efforts in geophysics, geology, and geochemistry;
• Be critically dependent on the ability to mobilize high technology tools for acquisition of data in the field, for study of materials in the laboratory, and for modeling systems on the computer;
• Include three-dimensional study of the subsurface by geophysical means, direct measurement of plate motions, detailed monitoring of earthquakes and of deformation near plate boundaries, and instrumentation and sampling of the subsurface through drilling;
• Often involve increased coordination and collaboration among scientists from universities and other government agencies as well as from industry;
• Be of such a scope that they will require a multiple year effort to complete;
• Be focused projects of finite duration; and
• Involve an initial screening by means of a preliminary proposal process (see section on "Preliminary Proposals").

Contacts: Leonard E. Johnson, Program Director, Directorate for Geosciences, Division of Earth Sciences, 785 S, telephone: (703) 292-8559, fax: (703) 292-9025, email: lejohnso@nsf.gov

Cooperative Studies Of The Earth's Deep Interior (CSEDI) – NSF 06-578

Due Date for Applications: September 25, 2008 (September 25, annually)

Expected Total Number of Awards: 5-10 Estimated Total Program Funding: $2,000,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06578/nsf06578.pdf

Overview: The Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) invites the submission of proposals for collaborative, interdisciplinary studies of the Earth's interior within the framework of the community-based initiative known as Cooperative Studies of the Earth's Deep Interior (CSEDI). Funding will support basic research on the character and dynamics of the Earth's mantle and core, their influence on the evolution of the Earth as a whole, and on processes operating within the deep interior that affect or are expressed on the Earth's surface.

Projects may employ any combination of field, laboratory, and computational studies with observational, theoretical, or experimental approaches. Support is available for research and research infrastructure through grants and cooperative agreements awarded in response to investigator-initiated proposals from U.S. universities and other eligible institutions. Multidisciplinary work is required. EAR will consider co-funding of projects with other agencies and supports international work and collaborations.

Contacts: Robin Reichlin, Program Director, Geophysics; Telephone: (703) 292-8556; email: rreichli@nsf.gov Sonia Esperanca, Program Director, Petrology and Geochemistry; Telephone: (703) 292-8554, email: sesperan@nsf.gov

Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) – NSF 06-561

Due Date for Applications: May 10, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 10-15 Estimated Total Program Funding: $1,000,000 Award Ceiling: $150,000 Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06561/nsf06561.pdf

Overview: The Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Program is a broad-based, community-initiated, upper atmospheric research program. The goal is to understand the behavior of atmospheric regions from the middle atmosphere upward through the thermosphere and ionosphere into the exosphere in terms of coupling, energetics, chemistry, and dynamics on regional and global scales. These processes are related to the sources of perturbations that propagate upward from the lower atmosphere as well as to solar radiation and particle inputs from above. The activities within this program combine observations, theory and modeling. The specific goals of the CEDAR program include the study of: 1) dynamics and energetics of the upper atmosphere, with particular emphasis on the region between 60 and 150 km; 2) coupling between the mesosphere, ionosphere, thermosphere, exosphere, and magnetosphere; and 3) horizontal coupling between adjacent geographic regions. CEDAR support in the past has led to improved spectrometers, interferometers, and imagers; allowed upgrades of existing facilities; and supported the development of lidars and small radars. Several facilities contain a broad array of state-of-the-art tools, providing a solid infrastructure by which to address outstanding aeronomical problems. The CEDAR program encourages the use of both chains and clusters of instruments in scientific studies of atmosphere coupling processes. The CEDAR community continuously strives to update its science plan to focus on specific high-priority research areas. The most recent plan is the CEDAR Phase III report, which identified four key science areas: Polar aeronomy, Coupling with lower altitudes, Long-term variations, and Solar-terrestrial interactions. More information on the CEDAR program, the CEDAR Phase III report, and current high-priority research areas can be found at http://cedarweb.hao.ucar.edu. Normally, CEDAR awards are made for a duration of three years, but proposers may request from one to five years of funding provided the requested duration is adequately justified.

Contacts: Robert Kerr; telephone: (703) 292-8529; email: rkerr@nsf.gov Robert M. Robinson; telephone: (703) 292-8529; email: rmrobins@nsf.gov Shaun Young; telephone: (703) 292-8521; email: slyoung@nsf.gov

CubeSat-based Science Missions for Space Weather and Atmospheric Research –*UPDATED*

NSF 09-523

Due Date for Applications: Mar 10, 2010

Expected Total Number of Awards: 2 Estimated Total Program Funding: $900,000 Award Ceiling: $900,000 Award Floor: $300,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf09523

Overview: The overarching goal of the program is to execute small scientific satellite missions to advance space weather and atmospheric research. Equally important, it will provide essential opportunities to train the next generation of experimental space scientists and aerospace engineers. The program will support the development, construction, launch, and operation of small satellite systems as well as the distribution and analysis of the science data from the missions.

To facilitate launch of the satellites as secondary payloads, the focus of the program is on CubeSat-based satellites to be launched in California Polytechnic’s standardized CubeSat deployment system, the Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD). CubeSat and P-POD design specifications and guidance are open-source community standards and can be found at: http://www.cubesat.org . Under this program it is expected that 2 to 4 P-PODS will be launched every year, starting in 2009, accommodating at least as many individual satellite missions. Proposed missions are expected to fully comply with accepted CubeSat standards and proposals must clearly state and justify any deviations therefrom. Specifically, it is incumbent on proposals to clearly demonstrate that the proposed satellites can be launched by P-POD. If deviations are desired proposers should contact a cognizant NSF Program Officer before preparing a proposal for submission.

Awards funded through this solicitation are for science missions to include design, construction, testing and operation of satellites as well as data distribution and scientific analysis. To be considered for an award, proposals must describe complete science missions, including all of the above components. Leverage of other funding sources is allowed and encouraged. In the case that only partial funding for a mission is sought through this solicitation, a complete description of the mission is still required for the proposal and the proposal will be evaluated based on the full mission. The forming of appropriate collaborations that cover all the necessary areas of expertise within space science as well as aerospace engineering is also strongly encouraged. Emphasis of this solicitation is on space weather research but proposals for missions within other areas of atmospheric sciences will also be considered.

Contacts: Therese Moretto Jorgensen; email: tjorgens@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8518

Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation – NSF07-603

Due Date for Applications: Required Letter of Intent Due - August 30, 2008 - September 30, 2008; Preliminary Proposal Due - October 04 - November 04, 2008; Full Proposal Due - January 27 - February 27, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 30 Estimated Total Program Funding: $26,000,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07603/nsf07603.pdf

Overview: Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is NSF’s bold five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking. Computational thinking is defined comprehensively to encompass computational concepts, methods, models, algorithms, and tools. Applied in challenging science and engineering research and education contexts, computational thinking promises a profound impact on the Nation’s ability to generate and apply new knowledge. Collectively, CDI research outcomes are expected to produce paradigm shifts in our understanding of a wide range of science and engineering phenomena and socio-technical innovations that create new wealth and enhance the national quality of life. CDI seeks ambitious, transformative, multidisciplinary research proposals within or across the following three thematic areas: From Data to Knowledge: enhancing human cognition and generating new knowledge from a wealth of heterogeneous digital data; Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built, and Social Systems: deriving fundamental insights on systems comprising multiple interacting elements; and Building Virtual Organizations: enhancing discovery and innovation by bringing people and resources together across institutional, geographical and cultural boundaries. With an emphasis on bold multidisciplinary activities that, through computational thinking, promise radical, paradigm-changing research findings, CDI is unique within NSF. Accordingly, investigators are encouraged to come together in the development of far-reaching, high-risk science and engineering research and education agendas that capitalize on innovations in, and/or innovative use of, computational thinking. CDI projects are expected to build upon productive intellectual partnerships involving investigators from academe, industry and/or other types of organizations, including international entities. Congruent with the three thematic areas, CDI projects will enable transformative discovery to identify patterns and structures in massive datasets; exploit computation as a means of achieving deeper understanding in the natural and social sciences and engineering; simulate and predict complex stochastic or chaotic systems; explore and model nature’s interactions, connections, complex relations, and interdependencies, scaling from sub-particles to galactic, from subcellular to biosphere, and from the individual to the societal; train future generations of scientists and engineers to enhance and use cyber resources; and facilitate creative, cyber-enabled boundary-crossing collaborations, including those with industry and international dimensions, to advance the frontiers of science and engineering and broaden participation in STEM fields. Two types of CDI awards will be supported as a result of the first (FY 2008) CDI competition: Type I awards will require efforts up to a level roughly comparable to: summer support for two investigators with complementary expertise; two graduate students; and their collective research needs (e.g. materials, supplies, travel) for three years. Type II awards will require larger (than Type I) efforts up to a level roughly comparable to: summer support for three investigators with complementary expertise; three graduate students; one or two senior personnel (including post-doctoral researchers and staff); and their collective research needs (e.g. materials, supplies, travel) for four years. The integrative contributions of the Type II team should clearly be greater than the sum of the contributions of each individual member of the team. In subsequent years, subject to availability of funds, funding opportunities will be provided for three classes of awards, Types I and II as defined above, and Type III as defined below: Type III awards will require the engagement of larger (than Type II) multidisciplinary teams, roughly comparable to multiple senior investigators with complementary expertise, multiple graduate students, several senior personnel, and their collective research needs (e.g. materials, supplies, travel) for up to five years. As for Type II awards, the integrative contributions of the Type III team should be clearly greater than the sum of the contributions of each individual member of the team.

Contacts: Sirin Tekinay, CISE/CCF; telephone: (703) 292-8080; email: cdi@nsf.gov Thomas Russell, MPS/DMS; telephone: (703) 292-8080; email: cdi@nsf.gov Eduardo Misawa, ENG/CMMI; telephone: (703) 292-8080; email: cdi@nsf.gov

Decision, Risk and Management Sciences (DRMS) - PD-98-1321 Due Date for Applications: August 18, 2008; January 18, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5423 Overview: The Decision, Risk and Management Sciences program supports scientific research directed at increasing the understanding and effectiveness of decision making by individuals, groups, organizations, and society. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, doctoral dissertation research, and workshops are funded in the areas of judgment and decision making; decision analysis and decision aids; risk analysis, perception, and communication; societal and public policy decision making; management science and organizational design. The program also supports small grants for exploratory research of a time-critical or high-risk, potentially transformative nature (see Small Grants for Exploratory Research.)Funded research must be relevant to an operational or applied context, grounded in theory, and generalizable.

Contacts: Robert E. O'Connor roconnor@nsf.gov (703) 292-7263 Jonathan Leland jleland@nsf.gov (703) 292-7285 Jacqueline Meszaros jmeszaro@nsf.gov (703) 292-7261 Tracy A. Sykes tsykes@nsf.gov (703) 292-7323 995 N

Robbie  Brown  rbrown@nsf.gov (703) 292-7264  995 N   

Judith Simmons jsimmons@nsf.gov (703) 292-4347 995 N Collaboration in Mathematical Geosciences - 09-520 Due Date for Applications: Mar 10, 2009 Submission Window Date(s) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time): February 24, 2009 - March 10, 2009 January 08, 2010 - January 22, 2010 Expected Total Number of Awards: 28 Estimated Total Program Funding: $12,000,000 Award Ceiling: unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: Overview: The purpose of the Collaboration in Mathematical Geosciences (CMG) activity is to enable collaborative research at the intersection of mathematical sciences and geosciences, and to encourage cross-disciplinary education. Projects should fall within one of three broad themes: (1) mathematical and statistical modeling of complex geosystems, (2) understanding and quantifying uncertainty in geosystems, or (3) analyzing large/complex geoscience data sets. Research projects supported under this activity must be essentially collaborative in nature. Research groups must include at least one mathematical/statistical scientist and at least one geoscientist. Proposals that address problems with relevance to global change and sustainability are especially encouraged.

Contacts: * Junping Wang, Program Director, MPS/Division of Mathematical Sciences,

    telephone: (703) 292-4488, email: jwang@nsf.gov

  * Thomas F. Russell, Program Director, MPS/Division of Mathematical
    Sciences, telephone: (703) 292-4863, email: trussell@nsf.gov

  * Gabor Szekely, Program Director, MPS/Division of Mathematical
    Sciences, telephone: (703) 292-8869, email: gszekely@nsf.gov

  * Robin Reichlin, Program Director, GEO/Division of Earth Sciences,
    telephone: (703) 292-8556, email: rreichli@nsf.gov

  * Eric C. Itsweire, Program Director, GEO/Division of Ocean Sciences,
    telephone: (703) 292-8582, email: eitsweir@nsf.gov

  * Walter A. Robinson, Program Director, GEO/Division of Atmospheric
    Sciences, telephone: (703) 292-8527, email: warobins@nsf.gov

  * William J. Wiseman, Program Director, Office of Polar Programs,
    telephone: (703) 292-4750, email: wwiseman@nsf.gov

Discovery Research K-12 - 08-502

Due Date for Applications: January 9, 2009, January 10, 2010

Expected Total Number of Awards: 46-66 Estimated Total Program Funding: $50,000,000 Award Ceiling: depends on type of submission ($100,000-$4,000,000) Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08502/nsf08502.pdf

Overview: The Discovery Research K-12 (DR-K12) program seeks to enable significant advances in K-12 student and teacher learning of the STEM disciplines through research about, and development and implementation of, innovative resources, models, and technologies for use by students, teachers, and policy makers. Activities funded under this solicitation begin with a research question or hypothesis about K-12 STEM learning or teaching; develop, adapt, or study innovative resources, models, or technologies; and demonstrate if, how, for whom, and why their implementation affects learning. This solicitation calls for proposals that are responsive to either the Contextual Challenges strand or the Frontier Challenges strand. The former invites proposals that address the more immediate and pressing challenges facing K-12 STEM education at the national level. The latter anticipates opportunities for the future and supports initiatives on the frontiers of knowledge which challenge existing assumptions about learning and teaching within or across STEM fields, envision needs of learners in 10 to 15 years, and consider new and innovative ways to reach learners. Within these strands, the program calls for full research and development projects, exploratory projects, and synthesis projects. A DR-K12 Resource Network will be funded to support these efforts in FY 2008. In addition, conferences related to the mission of the DR-K12 program are also supported.

Contacts: Telephone: (703) 292-8620, Email: DRLDRK12@nsf.gov

Earth Sciences: Instrumentation and Facilities (EAR/IF) – NSF 07-553 **UPDATED**

Due Date for Applications: Full Proposal Target Date(s): February 23, 2009 July 08, 2009 Second Wednesday in July, Annually Thereafter February 10, 2010 Second Wednesday in February, Annually Thereafter Expected Total Number of Awards: 35-45 Estimated Total Program Funding: $7,000,000 Award Ceiling: $12,000,000 Award Floor: $1 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07553/nsf07553.pdf

Overview: The Instrumentation and Facilities Program in the Division of Earth Sciences (EAR/IF) supports meritorious requests within and across Earth science disciplines. EAR/IF will consider proposals for:

• Acquisition or Upgrade of Research Equipment that will advance laboratory and field investigations, and student research training opportunities in the Earth sciences;
• Development of New Instrumentation, Analytical Techniques or Software that will extend current research and research training capabilities in the Earth sciences;
• Support of National or Regional Multi-User Facilities that will make complex and expensive instruments or systems of instruments broadly available to the Earth sciences research and student communities;
• Support of Research Technicians who will provide for optimal and efficient operation of advanced instrumentation, analytical protocol development, and user training for Earth science research instrumentation;
• Development of Cyberinfrastructure for the Earth Sciences (Geoinformatics) that will enable transformative advances in Earth science research and education through novel application, development or adaptation of information technologies.
• Planned research uses of requested instruments must include basic research on solid-Earth and surface-Earth processes.

Support is available through grants or cooperative agreements awarded in response to investigator-initiated proposals. Human resource development and education are expected to be an integral part of all proposals submitted to EAR/IF. Proposals requesting equipment, infrastructure or personnel that will serve disciplines outside the Earth sciences may be jointly reviewed with other programs within the Foundation. EAR/IF will consider co-funding of projects with other NSF programs.

Contacts: David Lambert, Program Director, 785 S, telephone: (703) 292-8558, email: dlambert@nsf.gov Russell C. Kelz, Program Director, 785 S, telephone: (703) 292-4747, fax: (703) 292-9025, email: rkelz@nsf.gov

Environmental Engineering - PD 09-1440 Due Date for Applications: February 1, 2009 - March 1, 2009 August 15, 2009 - September 15, 2009 Expected Total Number of Awards: Estimated Total Program Funding: Award: The duration of unsolicited awards is generally one to three years. The average annual award size for the program is $100,000. Small equipment proposals up to $100,000 will also be considered and may be submitted during these windows. Any proposal received outside the announced dates will be returned without review. The duration of CAREER awards is five years. The submission deadline for Engineering CAREER proposals is in July every year. Please see the following URL for more information: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsf05027/nsf05027.jsp Proposals for Conferences, Workshops, and Supplements may be submitted at any time, but must be discussed with the program director before submission.

URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=501029

Overview: In broadest terms, the field of Environmental Engineering is concerned with understanding the impacts of human activities on the natural environment and developing the scientific basis for solving, mitigating, or managing environmental problems caused by human activities. The field emerged as a separate engineering discipline during the middle third of the 20th century, in response to widespread public concern about water and air pollution and increasingly extensive environmental degradation. However, its roots extend back to early efforts in public health engineering in the late 19th century and to ancient times with regard to urban drinking water systems. The Environmental Engineering program supports fundamental research and educational activities across the broad field it serves. The goal of this program is to encourage transformative research which applies scientific principles to minimize solid, liquid, and gaseous discharges into land, inland and coastal waters, and air that result from human activity, and to evaluate adverse impacts of these discharges on human health and environmental quality. The program fosters cutting-edge research based on fundamental science and four types of engineering tools - - measurement, analysis, synthesis, and design. Major areas of interest and activity in the program include:

• Developing innovative biological, chemical, and physical treatment processes to remove and degrade pollutants from water and air
• Measuring, modeling, and predicting the movement and fate of pollutants in the environment
• Developing and evaluating techniques to clean up polluted sites, such as landfills and contaminated aquifers, restore the quality of polluted water, air, and land resources and rehabilitate degraded ecosystems

Along with its sibling environmental programs (Environmental Technology, Environmental Sustainability, and Energy for Sustainability), the program fosters environmental sustainability through the development of techniques to minimize or avoid generating pollution. Research may be directed toward improving the cost-effectiveness of pollution avoidance, as well as developing new principles for pollution avoidance technologies. Research for new and improved sensors of environmental conditions and innovative waste reduction and recycling processes also are important components of this program.

Contacts:Clark C. K. Liu ccliu@nsf.gov (703) 292-4480

Environmental Implications of Emerging Technologies PD-09-1179 Due Date for Applications: Mar 01, 2009 Submission Window Dates February 01, 2009 - March 01, 2009 February 1 - March 1, Annually Thereafter August 15, 2009 - September 15, 2009 August 15 - September 15, Annually Thereafter

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award Ceiling: unknown Award Floor: unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=501030

Overview: The Environmental Implications of Emerging Technologies program provides support to develop and test the environmental effects of new technologies.?? Fundamental and basic research is sought to establish and understand outcomes as a result of the implementation of new technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technology.?? The program also supports research on the development and refinement of sensors and sensor network technologies that can be used to measure a wide variety of physical, chemical, and biological properties of interest in characterizing, monitoring, and understanding environmental impacts. The program emphasizes engineering principles underlying technology impacts.?? Innovative production processes, waste reduction, recycling, and industrial ecology technologies are of interest.???? All of these have implications that would be relevant to this program.?? Current areas of support include: Understanding and mitigating how new developments in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technology will interact with the environment Nanotechnology environmental, health, and safety implications and applications Predictive methodology for the interaction of nanoparticles with the environment and with the human body, including predictive approaches for toxicity Fate and transport of natural, engineered, and incidental (by-product) nanoparticles Risk assessment and management of the effect of nanomaterials in the environment Evaluation of the effect of increased usage of renewable resources on water supply and land use Sensor and sensor network technologies as they relate to the measurement of these environmental implications Current areas of support for this program do not include biomedical and nanotoxicology topics involving clinical trials. The duration of unsolicited awards is generally one to three years.?? The average annual award size for the program is $80,000.?? Small equipment proposals up to $100,000 will also be considered and may be submitted during these windows.?? Any proposal received outside the announced dates will be returned without review. The duration of CAREER awards is five years.?? The submission deadline for Engineering CAREER proposals is in July every year.?? Please see the following URL for more information: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsf05027/nsf05027.jsp Proposals for Conferences, Workshops, and Supplements may be submitted at any time, but must be discussed with the program director before submission. Grants for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) and EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) replace the SGER program.?? Please note that proposals of these types must be discussed with the program director before submission.?? Further details are available in the PAPPG download, available below.?? Please refer to the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG), January 2009, (NSF 09-1) when you prepare your proposal.?? The PAPPG is available for download at:

Contacts: Paul L. Bishop pbishop@nsf.gov (703) 292-2161

Environmental Sustainability - PD 09-7643 Due Date for Applications: Full Proposal Window : February 1, 2009 - March 1, 2009 August 15 - September 15, Annually Thereafter

Expected Total Number of Awards: unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: unknown Award : The duration of unsolicited awards is generally one to three years. The average annual award size for the program is $100,000. Small equipment proposals up to $100,000 will also be considered and may be submitted during these windows. Any proposal received outside the announced dates will be returned without review.

URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=501027 Overview: The Environmental Sustainability program supports engineering research with the goal of promoting sustainable engineered systems that support human well-being and that are also compatible with sustaining natural (environmental) systems. These systems provide ecological services vital for human survival. The long-term viability of natural capital is critical for many areas of human endeavor. Research in Environmental Sustainability considers long time horizons and incorporates contributions from the social sciences and ethics. This program supports engineering research that seeks to balance society’s need to provide ecological protection and maintain stable economic conditions. There are four principal general research areas which are supported:

• Industrial Ecology
• Green Engineering
• Ecological Engineering
• Earth Systems Engineering

Topics of interest in Industrial Ecology include advancements in modeling such as life cycle assessment, materials flow analysis, input/output economic models, and novel metrics for measuring sustainable systems. Understanding materials flow and taking advantage of such understanding to substitute less toxic, longer lived materials are important areas for consideration. The effects of substituted materials on waste streams can be explored. Innovations in industrial ecology are encouraged. Engineering tools for estimating costs and ramifications of sustainable development must be developed, tested, and evaluated. In Green Engineering, research is encouraged to advance the sustainability of chemical processes, manufacturing processes, green building, and infrastructure. Many programs in the Engineering Directorate support research in environmentally benign manufacturing or chemical processes. The Environmental Sustainability program supports research that would affect more than one chemical or manufacturing process or that takes a systems or holistic approach to green engineering for infrastructure or green building. Of particular interest is the next generation of water and wastewater treatment that will dramatically decrease material and energy use, consider new paradigms for delivery of services, and promote longer life for engineered systems. Improvements in distribution and collection systems that will advance smart growth strategies and ameliorate effects of growth are research areas that are supported by Environmental Sustainability. Innovations in prevention and management of storm water, wastewater technology, indoor air quality, recycling and reuse of drinking water, and other green engineering techniques to support sustainable construction projects may also be fruitful areas for research. Ecological Engineering topics should focus on the engineering aspects of restoring ecological function to natural systems. Engineering research in enhancement of natural capital to foster sustainable development is encouraged. Many communities are involved in stream restoration, revitalization of urban rivers, and rehabilitation of wetlands that require engineering input. What is the fundamental engineering knowledge that is necessary for ecological engineering to function sustainability? Earth Systems Engineering considers aspects of large scale engineering research that involve mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation to climate change, and other global scale concerns. Contacts: Bruce Hamilton bhamilto@nsf.gov phone: (703) 292-7066

Informal Science Education (ISE) – NSF 08-547

Due Date for Applications: Notice of Intent – September 18, 2009; Full Proposal – December 18, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 50 Estimated Total Program Funding: $25,000,000 Award Ceiling: $5,000,000 Award Floor: $100,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08547/nsf08547.pdf

Overview: Project Grants (Full Proposals) are the primary means in which the ISE program invests in projects that develop and implement informal learning experiences for the general public. These projects have as their primary audience informal learners, from young children to senior citizens. The program also supports projects that enhance the infrastructure of informal science education. Therefore, the ISE program targets both public and professional audiences, as follows.

Public Audiences: For self-directed learning in informal settings. Projects should seek national, significant regional, or community-wide reach, depending on the methods used. They should create and sustain audience engagement through effective ISE techniques. Proposed projects should be grounded in both research and practice, building on the prior work, experience, and findings of others.

Professional Audiences (e.g. informal science educators, researchers, evaluators, and exhibit developers; producers and directors of science education radio, TV and large format films, and cyber-enabled and emerging learning technology developers; STEM research and formal education professionals engaged in informal education): For enhancement of informal STEM learning, knowledge, infrastructure, or systems.

Planning Grants Planning grants are intended for the exploratory phase of highly innovative projects or aspects of complex ISE projects that require resources beyond those usually needed for proposal development. Proposers are strongly encouraged to talk with an ISE Program Officer before submitting a planning proposal.

Conference, Symposia, and Workshop Grants Conferences, symposia, and workshops provide a specific format for certain projects targeting professionals. Conferences are one way that the ISE program can provide support to build capacity in the field of informal science learning. These special grants are intended to assemble experts for purposes of discussing issues of relevance to the informal learning community; the primary target audiences must be informal science education professionals, not the general public or professionals primarily from other fields. For example, conferences may be based on promoting new partnerships and collaborations, or exploring findings and effective practices in such areas as informal learning research and evaluation. Outcomes from these awards are expected to extend beyond publication of the proceedings or a report. Proposers should speak with an ISE Program Officer before submitting a conference proposal.

Grant Supplements For existing ISE awards, the ISE program will consider requests for small amounts of supplemental funding to ensure completion of the original scope of work based on changes in conditions after the award was made or to take advantage of opportunities to extend further the project impact. Supplemental funding will not be approved for such purposes as defraying costs associated with increases in salaries or additional indirect cost reimbursement (see GPG Chapter V, Section B.4). For standard and continuing awards, ISE supplements are limited to $200,000 or 20% of the total award amount, whichever is less; only one supplement will be considered per ISE award

Contacts: Email: DRLISE@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8616

Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS): Core Programs – NSF 08-575 Due Date for Applications: Medium Projects: October 1-31, 2009 ($500,000-$1,200,000); Large Projects ($1,200,001-$3,000,000): November 1-28, 2009; Small Projects (up to $500,000): December 1-17, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 200 Estimated Total Program Funding: $90,000,000 Award Ceiling: $3,000,000 Award Floor: $50,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08575/nsf08575.pdf

Overview: IIS supports three core programs as described below.

Human Centered Computing (HCC) Human beings, whether as individuals, teams, organizations, or societies, play an integral role in all stages of the creation and use of computational systems. Moreover, computing technologies and human societies co-evolve, transforming each other in the process. Human Centered Computing (HCC) research explores creative ideas, novel theories, and innovative technologies that advance our understanding of the complex and increasingly coupled relationships between people and computing.

HCC research targets diverse computing platforms such as traditional computers, handheld and mobile devices, robots, and wearable computers, at scales ranging from an individual device with a single user to large, evolving, heterogeneous socio-technical systems that are emerging from the increasingly pervasive availability of networking technologies. Environments of interest range from physical interaction with a single device to systems in which places and people, both physical and virtual, merge. As all electronic communications media become digital and interconnected, computing is also playing a central role in how humans communicate, work, learn, and play, dramatically transcending traditional geographical and cultural boundaries. HCC research explores and improves our understanding of new human-computer and human-human interactions, collaboration, and competition, developing systems that are aware of their social surroundings and of the conceptualizations, values, preferences, abilities, special needs, and diverse ranges of capability of the people that use them. HCC researchers and educators explore systems that interact with people using various and possibly multiple modalities such as innovative computer graphics, and haptic, audio, and brain-machine interfaces. HCC research outcomes are expected to transform the human-computer interaction experience, so that the computer is no longer a distraction or worse yet an obstacle, but rather a device or environment that empowers the user at work, in school, at home and at play, and that facilitates natural and productive human-computing integration.

The HCC program encourages research on how humans, in various roles and domains, perceive computing artifacts as they design and use them, and on the wider social implications of those artifacts. HCC supports social and behavioral scientists as well as computer and information scientists whose research contributes to the design and understanding of novel computing technologies and systems. More information on topics of interest to the HCC program is available at: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=500051&org=IIS&from=home.

Information Integration and Informatics (III) Recent years have seen massive growth in the scale, diversity, and complexity of data. Moreover, the data are often used in unanticipated and new ways that frequently require repurposing, transforming, and/or integrating multiple, uncoordinated, and sometimes variously restricted data sources over which data users have no control. The abundance and heterogeneity of data and data sources have created increasing demands on and opportunities for information technologies. The Information Integration and Informatics (III) program focuses on the processes and technologies involved in creating, managing, visualizing, and understanding diverse digital content in circumstances ranging from individuals through groups, organizations, and societies, and from individual devices to globally-distributed systems. Further, data are only part of a .knowledge life cycle. that progresses from data through knowledge and insight and, ultimately, to action. III funds innovative information technology research that can transform all stages of the knowledge life cycle.

III-funded projects are expected to lead to advances that are driven by specific information-technology challenges. Projects directed mainly at data-collection building and use, that apply existing data technologies to (perhaps) novel data sets, or that propose other activities with limited computing and information technology research potential are not appropriate for this program. III-supported activities can range from theoretical investigations to projects grounded in multi-disciplinary collaborations where data are central to the III-area research. In the case of multi-disciplinary projects proposers should explain the utility of the proposed work to the application domain and demonstrate expertise in that domain among the project participants. Regardless of research modality, proposals should make clear what computing and information technology challenges are being addressed and how the effectiveness of the work will be assessed.

More information on topics of interest to the III program is available at: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=500052&org=IIS&from=home.

Robust Intelligence (RI) The Robust Intelligence ( RI ) program encompasses all aspects of the computational understanding and modeling of intelligence in complex, realistic contexts. In contrast to systems that use limited reasoning strategies or address problems in narrow contexts, robust intelligence may be characterized by a system.s flexibility, resourcefulness, use of a variety of modeling or reasoning approaches, and use of real-world data in real time, demonstrating a level of intelligence and adaptability seen in humans and animals. The RI program advances and integrates the research traditions of artificial intelligence, computer vision, human language research, robotics, machine learning, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and related areas.

Researchers across all areas of RI are addressing progressively richer environments, larger-scale data, and more sophisticated computational and statistical approaches, looking to nature in many cases to model cognitive and computational processes. Interactions across traditional disciplines are also of increasing importance. For example, speech and dialogue research seeks to understand the cognitive psychological underpinnings of conversation that contribute to the robustness of human speech perception and intention understanding. Computer vision is exploring approaches developed in language processing to represent the semantic information in images and video in ways useful for mining, navigation, and robotic interaction, and working with ideas developed in computer graphics and physics-based modeling to understand and depict collections of images. A cognitive architecture may bridge sophisticated planning and problem solving modules with perception and action modules, perhaps accounting for certain human or animal behaviors. Robotic systems need to understand and interact with humans in unfamiliar and unstructured environments. Computational understanding of neurons, networks, and the brain increasingly draws on computer vision, robotics, and machine learning, and provides insights into the coding, representations, and learning underlying intelligent behavior in nature.

These examples are meant to convey the general goals of RI, not to limit its scope. The program supports projects that will advance the frontiers of all RI research areas, as well as those that integrate different aspects of these fields.

More information on topics of interest to the RI program is available at: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=500053&org=IIS&from=home.

Contacts: William S. Bainbridge; Human-Centered Computing (HCC); telephone: (703) 292-8930; email: wbainbri@nsf.gov Ephraim P. Glinert; Human-Centered Computing (HCC); telephone: (703) 292-8930; email: eglinert@nsf.gov Lawrence E. Brandt; Information Integration and Informatics (III); telephone: (703) 292-8930; email: lbrandt@nsf.gov Maria Zemankova; Information Integration and Informatics (III); telephone: (703) 292-8930; email: mzemanko@nsf.gov Douglas H. Fisher; Robust Intelligence (RI); telephone: (703) 292-7356; email: dhfisher@nsf.gov Kenneth Whang; Robust Intelligence (RI); telephone: (703) 292-8930; email: kwhang@nsf.gov

Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT)

NSF 09-519 Due Date for Applications: Preliminary Proposal Due Date(s) (required) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time): March 13, 2009

• Full Proposal Deadline(s) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time):

September 14, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 18 Eighteen new and renewal awards depending upon the quality of proposals and availability of funds.

Estimated Total Program Funding: $10,800,000 - Up to $3.0M per award over 5 years. For new awards in first year up to $400K and additional $200K for start-up. In addition for new/renewal awards up to $200K total per award for approx. 10 projects with integrated international research activities in Years 2 - 5. URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09519/nsf09519.htm

Overview: The Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program has been developed to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers who will pursue careers in research and education, with the interdisciplinary backgrounds, deep knowledge in chosen disciplines, and technical, professional, and personal skills to become, in their own careers, leaders and creative agents for change. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education, for students, faculty, and institutions, by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. It is also intended to facilitate diversity in student participation and preparation, and to contribute to a world-class, broadly inclusive, and globally engaged science and engineering workforce.

• Contacts: Carol Van Hartesveldt, Program Director for IGERT, 875, telephone: 703-292-8112, fax: 703-292-9048, email: cvanhart@nsf.gov
• Holly Given, Program Director for IGERT, 875, telephone: 703-292-5038, fax: 703-292-9048, email: hgiven@nsf.gov
• Yvette D. Jackson, IT Specialist, telephone: (703) 292-4925, email: yjackson@nsf.gov

Gabrielle Hrycyshyn, Science Assistant, telephone: (703) 292-2949, email: ghrycysh@nsf.gov

Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST)NSF 09-506 Due Date for Applications: Letter of Intent Due Date(s) (required) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time): January 12, 2009 ITEST January 19, 2010 ITEST Full Proposal Deadline(s) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time): February 20, 2009 ITEST February 24, 2009 Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) August 25, 2009 Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) February 12, 2010 ITEST Expected Total Number of Awards: 25 to 40 in each year for ITEST awards depending on the availability of funds for FY 2009 and FY 2010. Up to 12 continuing awards will be made in the Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) activity for the February 24, 2009, competition, pending availability of funds. Up to 12 continuing I3 awards will also be made in Fiscal Year 2010 for the August 25, 2009, competition, pending availability of funds

Estimated Total Program Funding: $35,000,000 in each year for new Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) projects in FY 2009 and FY 2010 pending availability of funds. $10,000,000 for Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) projects across multiple EHR programs for each of Fiscal Years 2009 and 2010, pending the availability of funds.

Award Ceiling: unknown

Award Floor: unknown

URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09506/nsf09506.htm#pgm_desc_txt

Overview: The ITEST program responds to current concerns and projections about the growing demand for professionals and information technology workers in the U.S. and seeks solutions to help ensure the breadth and depth of the STEM workforce. ITEST supports research studies to address questions about how to find solutions. It also supports the development, implementation, testing, and scale-up of implementation models. A large variety of possible approaches to improving the STEM workforce and to building students’ capacity to participate in it may be implemented and studied. ITEST projects may include students or teachers, kindergarten through high school age, and any area of the STEM workforce. Projects that explore cyberlearning, specifically learning with cyberinfrastructure tools such as networked computing and communications technologies in K-12 settings, are of special interest. This program is interested in addressing such questions as: What does it take to effectively interest and prepare students to participate in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce of the future? What are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that students need in order to participate productively in the changing STEM workforce and be innovators, particularly in STEM-related networked computing and information and communication technology (ICT) areas? How do they acquire them? How can the Nation’s burgeoning cyberinfrastructure be harnessed as a tool for STEM learning in classrooms and informal learning environments? What will ensure that the nation has the capacity it needs to participate in transformative, innovative STEM advances? How can we assess and predict inclination to participate in the STEM fields and how can we measure and study impact of various models to encourage that participation? Four types of projects are invited: Research projects enrich the understanding of issues related to enlarging the STEM workforce. Research projects may conduct efficacy and effectiveness studies of intervention models, conduct longitudinal studies of efforts to engage students in the STEM areas, develop instruments to assess engagement, persistence, and other relevant constructs of student motivation, or conduct studies to identify predictors of student inclination to pursue STEM career trajectories. The program is especially interested in projects that target students from groups that are underserved and underrepresented in STEM and ICT-intensive careers, including those residing in rural and economically disadvantaged communities. Strategies projects design, implement, and evaluate models for classroom, after-school, summer, virtual, and/or year-round learning experiences for students and/or teachers. The strategies are intended to encourage students’ readiness for, and their interest and participation in, the STEM workforce of the future. Strategies project proposals must describe the anticipated contribution to the research knowledge base about STEM career preparation in addition to immediate impacts on participants. Scale-up projects implement and test models to prepare students for information technology or the STEM workforce of the future in a large-scale setting such as at state or national level. A scale-up project must be based on evidence of demonstrated success from an existing strategy for students or teachers. Conferences and Workshops target STEM educators (from both the formal and informal education communities), educational researchers, and evaluators. The proposed conferences would be expected to contribute to the development of a research agenda on K-12 STEM workforce preparation and development issues, workforce participation, and cyberlearning. Conferences or workshops must be designed to bring together individuals with expertise in technology and STEM education, career development, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, science fields, and other communities that are invested in STEM workforce careers. Evaluation approaches for innovative STEM and ICT workforce motivation, preparation, and development models are also sought. Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) projects enable faculty, administrators, and others in institutions to think and act strategically about the creative integration of NSF-funded awards, with particular emphasis on awards managed through programs in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), but not limited to those awards. For Fiscal Year 2009, proposals are being solicited in nine EHR programs that advance I3 goals: CREST, GSE, HBCU-UP, ITEST, LSAMP, MSP, Noyce, RDE, and TCUP.

• Contacts: Address questions to, telephone: (703) 292-8628, email: DRLITEST@nsf.gov
• Julia V. Clark, ITEST co-lead, telephone: (703) 292-5119, email: jclark@nsf.gov
• Sylvia M. James, ITEST co-lead, telephone: (703) 292-5333, email: sjames@nsf.gov
• Larry E. Suter, ITEST co-lead, telephone: (703) 292-5144, email: lsuter@nsf.gov

George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Research *NEW* NSF 09-524 Due Date for Applications: Mar 27, 2009 Full Proposal Deadline(s): March 27, 2009 Fourth Friday in March, Annually Thereafter

Expected Total Number of Awards: 14

Estimated Total Program Funding: $7,000,000 Award Ceiling: $1,200,000 Award Floor: $100,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf09524

Overview: The Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) in the Directorate for Engineering (ENG) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) invites proposals for research that uses the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) to advance knowledge discovery and innovation for (1) earthquake and tsunami loss reduction of our nation's civil infrastructure, and (2) new experimental simulation techniques and instrumentation for NEES. NEES comprises a network of earthquake engineering experimental equipment sites available for experimentation on-site or in the field and through telepresence. NEES equipment sites include shake tables, geotechnical centrifuges, a tsunami wave basin, unique large-scale testing laboratory facilities, and mobile and permanently installed field equipment. The NEES networking cyberinfrastructure connects, via Internet2, the equipment sites as well as provides telepresence, a curated central data repository, simulation tools, and collaborative tools for facilitating on-line planning, execution, and post-processing of experiments. Projects proposed and supported under this solicitation must use one or more of the NEES equipment sites listed at http://www.nees.org and their related cyberinfrastructure.

Contacts: Richard J. Fragaszy, Program Director, Geotechnical Engineering Program, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, 545 S, telephone: (703) 292-7011, fax: (703) 292-9053, email: rfragasz@nsf.gov

Joy M. Pauschke, Program Director, George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, 545 S, telephone: (703) 292-7024, fax: (703) 292-9053, email: jpauschk@nsf.gov

M. P. Singh, Program Director, Hazard Mitigation and Structural Systems Program, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, 545 S, telephone: (703) 292-8071, fax: (703) 292-9053, email: mpsingh@nsf.gov

Dennis Wenger, Program Director, Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events Program, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, 545 S, telephone: (703) 292-8606, fax (703) 292-9053, email: dwenger@nsf.gov

Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) NSF 09-505

Due Date for Applications: Aug 04, 2009 Preliminary Proposal Due Date(s) (required) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time): February 26, 2009 Preliminary Proposal Deadline Full Proposal Deadline(s): August 04, 2009 BY INVITATION ONLY

Expected Total Number of Awards: 20

Estimated Total Program Funding: $40,000,000 Award Ceiling: Award Floor: URL: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf09505

Overview: The Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) program seeks to catalyze a higher level of international engagement in the U.S. science and engineering community by supporting innovative, international research and education collaborations. The program will enable U.S. scientists and engineers to establish collaborative relationships with international colleagues in order to advance new knowledge and discoveries at the frontiers of science and engineering and to promote the development of a diverse, globally-engaged U.S. scientific and engineering workforce. International partnerships are, and will be, increasingly indispensable in addressing many critical science and engineering problems. As science and engineering discoveries result more and more from international collaboration, U.S. researchers and educators must be able to operate effectively in teams comprised of partners from different nations and cultural backgrounds. The PIRE program will support bold, forward-looking research whose successful outcome results from all partners—U.S. and foreign—providing unique contributions to the research endeavor. It is also intended to facilitate greater student preparation for and participation in international research collaboration, and to contribute to the development of a diverse, globally-engaged U.S. science and engineering workforce. The program aims to support partnerships that will strengthen the capacity of institutions, multi-institutional consortia, and networks to engage in and benefit from international research and education collaborations.

Contacts: * Elizabeth Lyons, Program Coordinator, 940N, telephone: (703) 292-7256,

    fax: (703) 292-9067, email: PIRE-info@nsf.gov

  * Anne Emig, Program Manager, 935N, telephone: (703) 292-7241, fax: (703)
    292-9067, email: PIRE-info@nsf.gov

  * Shireen Yousef, Science Assistant, 940N, telephone: (703) 292-8429, fax:
    (703) 292-9067, email: PIRE-info@nsf.gov

Petrology and Geochemistry – NSF 06-543

Due Date for Applications: 06/01/2009 12/01/2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 50-60 Estimated Total Program Funding: $13,900,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06543/nsf06543.pdf

Overview: The Petrology and Geochemistry program supports basic research on the history of formation and evolution of the chemical composition of solid materials in the Earth’s crust, mantle, and core. Proposals in this program cover deep Earth processes that lead to the formation and geochemical evolution of igneous and metamorphic rocks, including ore genesis and all aspects of volcanology. This program also supports projects that study chemical properties of natural minerals at high pressures and temperatures. Most projects will use methods such as major and trace element geochemistry; stable and radiogenic isotope geochemistry and geochronology; experimental mineralogy, petrology, and volcanology; thermodynamic modeling of high temperature geochemical and mineral-forming processes; spectroscopy and crystallography; physical and chemical volcanology. Proposals to study extraterrestrial materials will be considered only if applicable to understanding processes that led to the formation and evolution of Planet Earth. Analytical method development in geochemistry, and disciplinary-focused or research based GeoInformatics proposals may be considered by this program or co-reviewed with the Instrumentation and Facilities program. Proposals in solid earth petrology and high-T geochemistry that focus on research across the ocean-continent waterline may be considered jointly with the Marine Geology and Geophysics program (in the Division of Ocean Sciences).

Contacts: Sonia Esperanca; telephone: (703) 292-8554; email: sesperan@nsf.gov William Leeman; telephone: (703) 292-7411; email: wleeman@nsf.gov

Population and Evolutionary Processes – PD 04-1127

Due Date for Applications: January 9, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12824&org=ERE&from=home

Overview: The Population and Evolutionary Processes Cluster focuses on population properties that lead to variation within and among populations. Approaches include empirical and theoretical studies of microevolution, organismal adaptation, geographical differentiation, natural hybridization and speciation, as well as processes that lead to macroevolutionary patterns of trait evolution. The Population and Evolutionary Processes Cluster funds research in the following areas.

Population Dynamics: Studies of the demography of age- and stage-structured populations and of changes in populations, using analytic, stochastic, or statistical approaches.

Evolutionary Ecology: Studies of single species from an ecological and evolutionary perspective including: life history and life cycle phenomena of terrestrial, freshwater, and wetland organisms; patterns of natural and sexual selection; causes and consequences of reproductive isolation; phylogeography; and single-lineage phyletic evolution. Please note that studies focusing on interactions among species should be directed to the Ecological Biology Cluster.

Evolutionary Genetics: Studies of population and quantitative genetics; how micro- and macro-evolutionary processes, including epigenetics and development, explain the evolution of complex phenotypes.

Molecular Population Biology: Studies of the causes and consequences of variation, change, selection, and evolution of biochemical characteristics, RNA and DNA sequences, and mobile elements; how the properties of genes (number, arrangement, and pattern) and their interactions determine evolutionary processes; the evolution of genetic architecture; and evolutionary genomics.

Contacts: Judith L. Bronstein; email: jbronste@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8570 Samuel M. Scheiner; email: sscheine@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-7175 Nancy J. Huntly; email: nhuntly@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8061 Bette Loiselle; email: bloisell@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-7207

Research in Support of the National Space Weather Program (NSWP) – NSF 07-520 Due Date for Applications: January 16, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 10-20 Estimated Total Program Funding: $1,500,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07520/nsf07520.pdf

Overview: An effective National Space Weather Program requires a strong commitment to basic research in many areas of space-related science. Emphasis will be placed upon understanding the fundamental physical processes that affect the state of the Sun, solar wind, magnetosphere, ionosphere, and upper atmosphere, while focusing on answering research questions that will improve the ability to specify and predict conditions in the space environment. Although any proposal meeting the above criteria will be considered, several basic research areas address significant gaps in our present understanding and represent particular challenges in achieving Space Weather goals:

• Understanding and prediction of processes affecting solar activity and the propagation of resulting solar effects to the Earth via the solar wind;
• Coupling between the solar wind and the magnetosphere and between the magnetosphere and ionosphere;
• The origin and energization of magnetospheric plasma;
• The triggering and temporal evolution of storms and substorms;
• Improved global ionospheric specification and forecast of the evolution of ionospheric irregularities, including the onset of low latitude ionospheric irregularities, with particular emphasis on those processes affecting communication and navigation systems;
• Improved specification of thermospheric dynamics and neutral densities;
• Validation and enhancement of space weather models to improve specification and prediction capabilities, with emphasis on the application of data assimilation techniques;
• Advanced remote sensing instrumentation for improved detection and/or understanding of key space weather phenomena.

Modelers who wish to implement and run codes at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) in order to accomplish any of the above objectives may include these activities in their proposals. For a description of the CCMC see http://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ . Proposers should make it clear which part of the total proposed effort relates to, or is dependent on, the CCMC. Researchers who currently have grants from NSF may request a supplement to allow them to utilize the CCMC facilities.

Contacts: Kile B. Baker; telephone: (703) 292-8519; email: kbaker@nsf.gov Paul Bellaire; telephone: (703) 292-8529; email: pbellair@nsf.gov Richard A. Behnke; telephone: (703) 292-8518; email: rbehnke@nsf.gov Cassandra Fesen; email: cfesen@nsf.gov; telephone: (703) 292-8529 Robert M. Robinson; telephone: (703) 292-8529; email: rmrobins@nsf.gov

RIDGE 2000 – NSF 07-571

Due Date for Applications: January 15, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 10 Estimated Total Program Funding: $26,000,000 over 5 years Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07571/nsf07571.pdf

Overview: RIDGE 2000 scientific objectives are encapsulated in the phrase "from mantle to microbes..." which expresses the inextricable linkages between the geological processes of planetary renewal that occur along the mid-oceanic plate boundary and the chemical and biological processes that sustain life, in the absence of sunlight, in the deep ocean. The hallmarks of RIDGE 2000 scientific studies focus on limited, scientifically defined geographic areas; co-location of experiments in space and time; and integration across a wide range of disciplines. By emphasizing an integrated, investigative approach that can be accomplished only with high levels of coordination, RIDGE 2000 complements ongoing ridge crest research. International activities through InterRidge serve to increase substantially the effectiveness and the accomplishments of this coordinated strategy.

RIDGE 2000 Integrated Studies A strategy for focused, whole-system studies of global mid-ocean ridge processes is presented in the Integrated Studies section and related sections of the RIDGE 2000 Science Plan available from the RIDGE 2000 Office web site at www.ridge2000.org. The RIDGE 2000 office e-mail address is ridge2000@ucsd.edu.RIDGE 2000 Integrated Studies address the complex, inter-linked array of processes that supports life at and beneath the sea floor as a consequence of heat and material transfer from the Earth's deep mantle, to the crust and overlying ocean. Integrated Studies develop focused, quantitative, whole-system models through coordinated, integrated and interdisciplinary experiments. The overarching goal is to understand the mid-ocean ridge as a complex geobiological system with interconnected parts related through diverse controls and feedbacks. This understanding requires integrated and often simultaneous investigations of all aspects of the system, and the linkages among them, at a small number of sites that encompass a range of external forcing functions.

RIDGE 2000 Time Critical Studies Strategies for capturing transient or ephemeral events along the mid-ocean ridge are described in the relevant sections of the RIDGE 2000 Science Plan.RIDGE 2000 Time Critical Studies focus on the immediate biological, chemical and geological consequences of transient "events" along the mid-ocean ridge system. Events may include volcanic eruptions on the sea floor, intrusion of dikes or other magma bodies at the ridge axis, deformation events related to sea floor spreading and related phenomena. Transient events are short-lived, occurring on time-scales of seconds to months or, possibly, years. They can have major biological, chemical and geological impacts on the mid-ocean ridge system. RIDGE 2000 focuses on detecting and locating events as they occur, and on rapid deployment of instruments and sampling devices to events that are still in progress.

RIDGE 2000 Time Critical Studies are limited to monitoring and rapid response efforts in the northeast Pacific. This restriction recognizes that this is currently the only area in which real-time monitoring is available and coincident with rapid response capabilities. If a real-time detection and rapid response capability becomes feasible in other areas, the RIDGE 2000 Steering Committee will revisit this restriction.

Contacts: Adam Schultz, telephone: (703) 292-7597, email: aschultz@nsf.gov Phillip Taylor, telephone: (703) 292-7715, email: prtaylor@nsf.gov

Science of Learning Centers (SLC) – NSF 07-7278

Due Date for Applications: February 2, 2009 and August 3, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 25 Estimated Total Program Funding: $3,000,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5567

Overview:

• • • There will be no SLC Centers or Catalyst competitions for FY07 and FY08. However, the Science of Learning Centers Program is currently accepting proposals for workshops, Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGERs), and supplements to NSF awards, including those funded by other programs.

The Science of Learning Centers program (SLC) offers awards for large-scale, long-term Centers that create the intellectual, organizational and physical infrastructure needed for the long-term advancement of Science of Learning research. It supports research that harnesses and integrates knowledge across multiple disciplines to create a common groundwork of conceptualization, experimentation and explanation that anchor new lines of thinking and inquiry towards a deeper understanding of learning.

The goals of the Science of Learning Centers Program are to advance the frontiers of all the sciences of learning through integrated research; to connect the research to specific scientific, technological, educational, and workforce challenges; to enable research communities to capitalize on new opportunities and discoveries; and to respond to new challenges.

The SLC Program construes learning broadly, including that of animals, humans and machines. The program is open to many possible approaches and topics that can be brought to examine what learning is, how it is affected, how it works at different levels, how biologically-derived learning principles can inform artificial systems and vice versa. The Program places high value on creativity, integration of theoretical and empirical work, innovative models of research and research transfer, and inventive uses of technology.

Science of Learning Centers are built around a unifying research focus and incorporate a diverse, multidisciplinary environment involving appropriate partnerships with academia, industry, all levels of education, and other public and private entities.

Catalyst awards are made during the initial years of the program. Catalyst awards are designed to enable partnership-building and research activities that facilitate interdisciplinary approaches to questions that require multiple areas of expertise.

Contacts: Soo-Siang Lim; Email: slim@nsf.gov; Phone: (703) 292-7878 Joan Straumanis; Email: jstrauma@nsf.gov; Phone: (703) 292-4589 Michelle Jenkins; Email: cjenkins@nsf.gov; Phone : (703) 292-7874

Science, Technology, and Society (STS) – NSF 08-553

Due Date for Applications: August 1, 2008; February 1, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 40 Estimated Total Program Funding: $9,000,000 Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08553/nsf08553.txt

Overview: The Science, Technology, and Society Program (STS) supports research and associated activities that examine the relationships among science, technology, engineering, and society. It considers proposals that examine historical, philosophical, social, cultural, policy, and ethical questions that arise in connection with science and technology, and their respective interactions with society. It is committed to the importance and intrinsic value of scholarly research conducted by individual investigators; to qualitative, interpretive, and quantitative research; and to analytical, critical, theoretical, empirical, ethnographic, and comparative studies.

STS considers proposals in four broad, overlapping, and mutually complementary areas of research described below. It emphasizes analytical and interpretive studies that examine scientific and technological theory and practice. Studies in this field may also explore the impact of science and technology on society and how ethical, intellectual, cultural, and social factors influence science and technology. Questions pertaining to knowledge production and its effects, both within the scientific community and beyond, are also central to STS. Within STS a variety of analytical tools, perspectives, and research methodologies are used.

Studies of ethics and values in science and technology examine normative issues in the conduct of science and the development and implementation of technology. Proposals focus on how ethical issues and values interconnect with science and technology, and how norms and values institutionalized in science and technology engage with society. Proposals in this area of STS may examine how ethics in scientific and technological research are defined, and by whom.

Studies in history and philosophy of science and technology use the traditions and tools of history and philosophy to examine intellectual, theoretical, socio-cultural, and material dimensions of science and technology. Proposals in this area of STS engage in analytical, critical, reflective, and interpretive modes of study of the scientific and technological enterprises both past and present. History is broadly conceived to include social, cultural, institutional, and personal contexts. Philosophy may focus on a variety of modes such as providing epistemological, methodological, conceptual, or metaphysical perspectives on a particular theory or conceptual or technological innovation, or on science or technology more broadly.

Social studies of science and technology draw upon the social and behavioral sciences including anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and science and technology studies. Proposals in this area examine the interconnections of science, technology, and society. Supported research will bring the tools and theories of the social sciences to bear on such issues as how science and technology function in different societies, and how culture and society and science, technology, and engineering shape each other. A variety of methodologies are supported including ethnography, surveys, network analysis, interviews, modeling and theorizing, content analysis, and archival exploration.

Studies in policy on science and technology include research on social and strategic choices, especially policy choices, that influence knowledge production and innovation and their effects, and on the influences of scientific and technical knowledge and innovation on policy. Proposals in this area typically draw upon methodologies of the social sciences including qualitative, interpretive, and quantitative approaches.

The four areas that constitute the core of STS are regarded by the program as mutually complementary. STS encourages the submission of hybrid proposals that strive to integrate research involving two or more of these core areas. Each proposal is evaluated by an interdisciplinary panel consisting of experts from each of the core areas. Doing so facilitates the assessment of different disciplinary dimensions of hybrid proposals.

Contacts: Frederick Kronz; email: fkronz@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-7283 Laurel Smith-Doerr; telephone: (703) 292-8543; email: lsmithdo@nsf.gov Stephen Zehr; telephone: (703) 292-7318; email: szehr@nsf.gov Lauren Lanahan; telephone: (703) 292-4927, email: llanahan@nsf.gov

Strategic Technologies for Cyberinfrastructure Program (STCI) - PD-06-7231

Due Date for Applications: August 14, 2008; February 12, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=500066&org=OPP

Overview: The primary purpose of the Strategic Technologies for Cyberinfrastructure Program (STCI) is to support work leading to the development and/or demonstration of innovative cyberinfrastructure services for science and engineering research and education that fill gaps left by more targeted funding opportunities. In addition, it will consider highly innovative cyberinfrastructure education, outreach and training proposals that lie outside the scope of targeted solicitations.

The National Science Foundation provides a number of targeted funding opportunities for the development of cyberinfrastructure, for the provision of cyberinfrastructure services, and for related education, outreach and training. However, cyberinfrastructure technology and training are broad continua. It is anticipated that, at any given time, there will be ideas that do not map neatly onto the extant portfolio of cyberinfrastructure solicitations yet have a high potential impact on research and education. Accordingly, the Strategic Technologies for Cyberinfrastructure program will accept proposals for cyberinfrastructure development, demonstration, education, outreach and training activities that are not aligned with the specific goals of other existing cyberinfrastructure funding opportunities and which have the potential to transform multiple areas of research or education.

Projects appropriate for this program should:

• Be activities that include a demonstration of the potential impact on science or engineering research or education;
• Generate outcomes not currently under development elsewhere;
• Meet a clearly described cyberinfrastructure need not met elsewhere;
• Generate outcomes that will be of interest to a range of science and engineering communities.

Investigators interested in submitting proposals with large budgets (roughly $500,000 per year or larger) are encouraged to develop strong support from within the science and engineering community prior to submitting a proposal and to document this support within the proposal; for example, in the form of references to workshop reports, reports from the National Academies of Science or Engineering, or other reports based on broad community input, on the topic proposed.

Proposals should include a clear and compelling description of why the proposed work has the potential to significantly advance research or education capabilities in multiple areas of science and engineering. Proposals should also provide a convincing explanation of why the project is not suitable for other NSF programs or solicitations.

Before developing a proposal intended for this Program, investigators are encouraged to discuss their ideas with program officers associated with the Program to check that there is no targeted solicitation in development for which the project would be a better fit. Proposals for workshops, symposia and Small Grants for Exploratory Research clearly related to the scope of the Program described above, may be submitted.

Contacts: Abani Patra; email: apatra@nsf.gov; telephone: (703) 292-8970 Lucy Nowell; email: lnowell@nsf.gov; telephone: (703) 292-8970 Kevin Thompson; email: kthompso@nsf.gov; telephone: (703) 292-8962 Steve Meacham; email: smeacham@nsf.gov; telephone: (703) 292-8970

Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners - 07-601

Due Date for Applications: October 6, 2008 (pre-proposal); February 16, 2009 (Full proposal)

Expected Total Number of Awards: 5 Estimated Total Program Funding: $100,000,000 Award Ceiling: Award Floor: $20,000,000 URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.pdf

Overview: Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and increasingly data-intensive. Digital data are not only the output of research but provide input to new hypotheses, enabling new scientific insights and driving innovation. Therein lies one of the major challenges of this scientific generation: how to develop the new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams. This solicitation addresses that challenge by creating a set of exemplar national and global data research infrastructure organizations (dubbed DataNet Partners) that provide unique opportunities to communities of researchers to advance science and/or engineering research and learning. The new types of organizations envisioned in this solicitation will integrate library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise to: provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science and/or engineering data over a decades-long timeline; continuously anticipate and adapt to changes in technologies and in user needs and expectations; engage at the frontiers of computer and information science and cyberinfrastructure with research and development to drive the leading edge forward; and serve as component elements of an interoperable data preservation and access network. By demonstrating feasibility, identifying best practices, establishing viable models for long term technical and economic sustainability, and incorporating frontier research, these exemplar organizations can serve as the basis for rational investment in digital preservation and access by diverse sectors of society at the local, regional, national, and international levels, paving the way for a robust and resilient national and global digital data framework. These organizations will provide: a vision and rationale that meet critical data needs, create important new opportunities and capabilities for discovery, innovation, and learning, improve the way science and engineering research and education are conducted, and guide the organization in achieving long-term sustainability; an organizational structure that provides for a comprehensive range of expertise and cyberinfrastructure capabilities, ensures active participation and effective use by a wide diversity of individuals, organizations, and sectors, serves as a capable partner in an interoperable network of digital preservation and access organizations, and ensures effective management and leadership; and activities to provide for the full data management life cycle, facilitate research as resource and object, engage in computer science and information science research critical to DataNet functions, develop new tools and capabilities for learning that integrate research and education at all levels, provide for active community input and participation in all phases and all aspects of Partner activities, and include a vigorous and comprehensive assessment and evaluation program. Potential applicants should note that this program is not intended to support narrowly-defined, discipline-specific repositories.

Contacts: Sylvia Spengler; telephone: (703) 292-8930; email: sspengle@nsf.gov Lucy Nowell; telephone: (703) 292-8970; email: lnowell@nsf.gov

Systematic Biology and Biodiversity Inventories – PD 04-7374

Due Date for Applications: January 9, 2009 Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12825&org=ERE&from=home

Overview: The Systematic Biology and Biodiversity Inventories Cluster supports research in taxonomy and systematics that contributes to: 1) using phylogenetic methods to understand the evolution of life in time and space, 2) discovery, description, and cataloguing global species diversity, and 3) organizing information from the above in efficiently retrievable forms that best meet the needs of science and society. The Systematic Biology and Biodiversity Inventories Cluster funds projects within the two Programs, Systematic Biology and Biodiversity Inventories, in addition to the PEET and PBI solicitations listed below. In addition, the cluster participates in AToL and other related funding opportunities.

The SBBI Cluster continues to encourage and support studies that seek to synthesize available and new species-level taxonomic information in the context of providing revisionary treatments and predictive classifications for particular groups of organisms. Proposals of this nature, submitted as Revisionary Synthesis in Systematics (REVSYS) proposals, can be submitted to either the Biodiversity Inventories or Systematic Biology Programs and should be identified as such using "REVSYS:" at the beginning of the project title.

The Systematic Biology Program supports the scientific study of biological diversity and phylogeny, for all groups of organisms and for all habitats on Earth, including marine environments. Activities include the discovery and description of species, the organization of taxonomic information into hierarchical predictive classifications associated with efficient, reliable identification keys, and the analysis of evolutionary and biogeographic relationships among groups of species and across the tree of life. This program also supports revisionary and monographic research on species that fully utilize modern information technology at all stages from data capture and analysis to electronic dissemination of results.

The Biodiversity Inventories Program supports expeditionary work to discover, describe, and document plant, animal, and microbial diversity throughout the world, whether terrestrial, freshwater, or marine, and with emphasis on well-vouchered natural history collections, or stocks and cultures including associated databases. Supported surveys may be primarily area-based (i.e., focusing on species inventory and discovery, including biogeographic or evolutionary hypothesis testing), clade-based (i.e., continental-scale to global species inventory for a particular taxonomic group, including evolutionary hypothesis testing), or guild-based (i.e., surveys that couple species inventory and discovery with ecological hypothesis testing). DNA inventory projects that do not address organismal diversity are discouraged in this program.

Partnership for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET) is a biennial special competition to address three biodiversity-related goals: monographic research on poorly known groups of organisms or groups that for which taxonomic expertise is being lost; training of at least two new taxonomic experts; and web-based bioinformatics for taxonomic resources. The deadline is March of odd-numbered years.

Planetary Biodiversity Inventories (PBI) is a biennial special competition to accelerate the discovery and study of the world's biodiversity. Proposals are invited from teams of investigators to conduct a worldwide, species-level systematic inventory of a major group of organisms. Each project should conduct fieldwork necessary to fill gaps in existing collections, produce descriptions, taxonomic revisions, web-searchable databases, and interactive keys (or other automated identification tools) for all new and known species in the targeted group, analyze their phylogenetic relationships, and establish predictive classifications for the group. Proposals may target any particular group of organisms from terrestrial, freshwater, or marine habitats, at any feasible level in the taxonomic hierarchy, but must be global in scope. The deadline for proposals is January 10 of even-numbered years.

Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) is an annual special competition to construct a phylogenetic tree that includes all major groups of organisms, the "Tree of Life." Proposals are invited that either focus on a particular taxonomic group or on the development of a tool, methodology or theory that supports the mission of AToL.

Contacts: Jerry Cook; email: sbbi@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-4821 Maureen Kearney; email: mkearney@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-7187 Richard M. McCourt; email: rmccourt@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8480

TeraGrid Phase III: eXtreme Digital Resources for Science and Engineering (XD) – NSF 08-571

Due Date for Applications: November 4, 2008 (Full proposal for High-Performance Remote Visualization and Data Analysis Services and pre-proposal for Integrating Services) and June 15, 2009 (Full proposal for Integrating Services)

Expected Total Number of Awards: 3-6 Estimated Total Program Funding: $32,000,000 Award Ceiling: Award Floor: URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08571/nsf08571.pdf

Overview: The experience of the TeraGrid and other projects in the U.S. and abroad that are focused on the ability to manipulate very large numbers of bits of information has shown that some key services are necessary for such an infrastructure to be effective. High-performance computing continues to grow in importance as a tool of research and education. Therefore, as was true in the TeraGrid, the provision of high-performance computing services remains one of the core services in the new infrastructure. In order to work with extremely large amounts of information in digital form, a significant digital storage capacity is required. Visualization is an important analysis tool for enabling researchers to interact with large volumes of information so remote visualization services are required. Effective software and algorithms are critical to permitting the manipulation, processing and analysis of very large amounts of digital information. The TeraGrid and its precursors have demonstrated that advanced user support is key to enabling a broad range of researchers and educators to work productively with advanced digital systems. Outreach and training are important for reducing the barriers to the use of advanced digital systems by the research and education community. Increasingly, communities of practice within research and education, share common software tools, primary data, and methods. Some of these groups have developed “Science Gateways” or “Computational end-stations,” virtual organizations that provide access to such resources through an online portal tailored to a specific community of practice. For a variety of reasons, the shared resources that enable researchers and educators to work with extremely large amounts of digital information are geographically distributed. In order to move large numbers of bits within this infrastructure requires high-bandwidth network connections between the nodes of the infrastructure and reliable mechanisms for moving data over these connections.

For many researchers and educators, it is likely that the digital resources that they draw upon will include both XD resources and computing systems and data collections on their home campuses, as well as digital data from observing systems or archives distributed around the world. XD should facilitate this. In addition, it is anticipated that an important external resource for some researchers will be the DataNet partnership (see NSF 07-601). One of the design goals of the architecture of XD should be ease of integration of XD and DataNet services. This solicitation requests proposals for the provision of some of the services that will make up XD infrastructure.

Key attributes of XD will be that:

• It is designed and implemented in a way that is consistent with sound system engineering principles.
• Its design is clearly tied to the user requirements of the science and engineering research community.
• It is implemented using a flexible methodology that permits the architecture to evolve in response to changing user needs.
• By default, it will present the individual user with a common user environment regardless of where the resources being used are located and whence the user is authenticating.
• It will offer a highly capable service interface to “community user accounts,” such as science gateways, that encompasses all of the services that are made available to such accounts.
• Its design will cater both to research groups that require very large amounts of computational resources for long periods of time and to individuals who seek to use high-end computation to reduce the time required for running their applications to seconds or minutes so that they can rapidly and interactively explore their research questions.
• Its design will cater to both researchers whose computations require very little data movement and to researchers who are performing very data-intensive computations.
• It will include both a production infrastructure and a small-scale, schedulable test grid. The latter will be available both to the XD operators for testing software and administrative policies with new functionality prior to deployment on the production grid, and as an experimental platform for researchers developing new grid technologies.
• To the maximum extent possible, the initial implementation of the system architecture is designed to exploit existing software technology, with some customization, and does not require the development of new software.
• The underlying mix of computing, storage and visualization hardware is heterogeneous.
• The mix of computing, storage and visualization hardware will change with time.

High-Performance Computing and Storage Services It is anticipated that the XD will contain between four and six nodes providing high-performance computing and storage services. These will be identified and funded through NSF’s “Track 2” program (see NSF 05-625) and its successors. Four or five of these nodes will provide production services. Several of these nodes may also provide access to and support for experimental high-performance computing resources.

High-Performance Remote Visualization and Data Analysis Services It is anticipated that several XD nodes will provide advanced remote visualization services and sophisticated data analysis tools. Proposals for up to two such service providers are requested in this solicitation.

Coordination and Management Service The XD Coordination and Management Service is a key component of XD. It will be responsible for (i) the design of the grid architecture of XD, (ii) the management of its implementation, (iii) the coordination of regular reporting of XD activities to NSF, (iv) the management of accounting, authorization, authentication, allocation and security services, (v) the coordination of the component services that make up XD, (vi) the maintenance of a responsive, user-centric operational posture for XD; (vii) the coordination of those service providers that provide access to physical resources to maintain a XD network that meets the needs of the user community.

Technology Audit and Insertion Service The Technology Audit and Insertion Service (TAIS) will both provide quality assurance and quality control for XD and will review and test advanced software tools for manipulating, processing and analyzing very large amounts of information, as these tools become available. The Technology Audit and Insertion Service will use XD computational, storage and visualization services for testing advanced software tools and developing deployment strategies, in partnership with the relevant service providers.

Advanced User Support Service “Advanced user support” is advanced consulting support that requires some commitment of time and effort by consulting staff that is measured in multiple person-months. It should cover a broad range of types of consulting, including support of researchers or research groups running complicated computer programs, researchers or research groups attempting to develop and use complex workflows, and researchers or research groups trying to develop or implement science gateways that harness XD resources in science gateways.

Training, Education and Outreach Service The Training, Education and Outreach Service will implement a robust national portfolio of activities in each of the following areas: training for staff, current users and prospective users; the integration of research and education; and the broadening of participation in science and engineering that exploits the XD resources by under-represented demographic groups. Architectural Drivers The XD is envisioned as a high-end service provider for science and engineering research that requires access to resources that, collectively:

• deliver significant computational capability;
• can work with very large flows of data;
• can internally move data rapidly;
• can provide remote visualization of very large datasets;
• can store and manage large collections of data, whether organized in simple files, scientific databases, or collections of more general digital objects;
• can provide very responsive and reliable service for computation requiring relatively small amounts of computing cycles and data movement.

One of the signature features envisioned for XD is its ability to facilitate much broader access to high-end digital resources by masking some of the traditional complexity surrounding the use of high-end digital resources from the researchers who employ it. This should encompass:

• a process for obtaining access to resources that is simpler than the traditional allocations process for high-end computing, storage and consulting services;
• a simple user interface, including a single logical namespace for all resources and services offered;
• a common user environment across service providers and access points;
• a well-designed and robust service interface that provides mechanisms for community-developed portals to access the XD resources and services;
• a mechanism for a user to attach a local compute or storage resource, that satisfies a defined protocol standard, to the common user environment so that the user can exploit it from the common user environment as if it were an XD resource;
• user-friendly documentation and user support services based on commercial best practices;
• access modes that are much broader than batch computing;
• support for complex scientific workflows including the ability to combine the use of different XD resources into a single workflow;
• and a centrally coordinated, vigorous outreach and education program.

As background for what follows, it should be assumed that, at the outset of XD, the physical resources dedicated to XD will consist of the following:

• high-end computational resources deployed at 3-5 geographically distinct sites;
• 1-3 high-throughput resources consisting of pools of single-node or small multi-node computing systems;
• Large pools of medium-term storage (implemented as rotating disk or solid-state disk storage) at each high-end computational resource;
• Long-term storage at some of the high-end computational resources;
• 1-3 high-capability visualization resources supporting remote visualization.

Contacts: Stephen Meacham; email: smeacham@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8970 Abani Patra; email: apatra@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8970

Tribal Colleges and Universities Program – NSF 09-509

Due Date for Applications: February 24, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards: 4

Estimated Total Program Funding: $2,000,000 Award Ceiling: $2,500,000 Award Floor: unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf09509

Overview: This program provides awards to enhance the quality of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instructional and outreach programs at Tribal Colleges and Universities, Alaskan Native-serving Institutions and Native Hawaiian-serving institutions. Support is available for the implementation of comprehensive institutional approaches to strengthen STEM teaching and learning in ways that improve access to, retention within, and graduation from STEM programs. Through this program, assistance is provided to eligible institutions in their efforts to bridge the digital divide and prepare students for careers in information technology, science, mathematics and engineering fields. Proposed activities should be the result of a careful analysis of institutional needs, address institutional and NSF goals, and have the potential to result in significant and sustainable improvements in STEM program offerings. Proposals are being solicited for Planning Grants, and two Implementation tracks: Initiation projects and STEM Teachers of Education Excellence Projects (STEEP). Innovation through Institutional Integration (I3) projects enable faculty, administrators, and others in institutions to think and act strategically about the creative integration of NSF-funded awards, with particular emphasis on awards managed through programs in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), but not limited to those awards. For Fiscal Year 2009, proposals are being solicited in nine EHR programs that advance I3 goals: CREST, GSE, HBCU-UP, ITEST, LSAMP, MSP, Noyce, RDE, and TCUP.

Contacts: Lura Chase, Program Director, telephone: (703) 292-8682, email: lchase@nsf.gov Michael Fredenberg, Program Director, telephone: (703) 292-8682, email: mfredenb@nsf.gov

Upper Atmospheric Facilities (UAF) – PD 04-4202 Due Date for Applications: Accepted Any Time

Expected Total Number of Awards: Unknown Estimated Total Program Funding: Unknown Award Ceiling: Unknown Award Floor: Unknown URL: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12808

Overview: The National Science Foundation supports four large incoherent-scatter radar facilities and the SuperDARN coherent scatter radar system. The incoherent-scatter radars are located along a longitudinal chain from Greenland to Peru. Each of the incoherent-scatter facilities is also equipped with powerful optical diagnostic instruments. The SuperDARN consists of a number of coherent-scatter HF radars in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

The major goal of the Upper Atmospheric Facilities (UAF) is to promote basic research on the structure and dynamics of the Earth's upper atmosphere. Research efforts utilizing these facilities have strong links to the Aeronomy Program and the Magnetospheric Physics Program.

Contacts: Robert M. Robinson; email: rmrobins@nsf.gov; phone: (703) 292-8529

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Higher Education Challenge- USDA-CSREES-CGP-001845

Due Date for Applications: Jan 30, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards:

Estimated Total Program Funding: $5,200,000 Award Ceiling: $500,000 Award Floor: $150,000 URL: http://www.csrees.usda.gov/funding/rfas/higher_education_challenge.html

Overview: Projects supported by the Higher Education Challenge Grants Program will: (1) address a State, regional, national, or international educational need; (2) involve a creative or non-traditional approach toward addressing that need that can serve as a model to others; (3) encourage and facilitate better working relationships in the university science and education community, as well as between universities and the private sector, to enhance program quality and supplement available resources; and (4) result in benefits that will likely transcend the project duration and USDA support.

Contacts: Mr. P. Gregory Smith; National Education Program Leader; Higher Education Programs; Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service; STOP 2251; 1400 Independence Ave, SW; Washington, DC 20250-2251; Telephone: (202) 720-1973; Fax: (202) 720-2030; E-mail: HEC@csrees.usda.gov.

Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian- Serving Institutions USDA-CSREES-AHSI-002009

Due Date for Applications: Jan 30, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards:

Estimated Total Program Funding: $3,000,000 Award Ceiling: $1,500,000 Award Floor: $50,000 URL: http://www.csrees.usda.gov/funding/rfas/alaska.html

Overview: The purpose of this program is to promote and strengthen the ability of Alaska Native-Serving Institutions and Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions to carry out education, applied research, and related community development programs. CSREES intends this program to address educational needs, as determined by each institution, within a broadly defined arena of food and agricultural sciences-related disciplines. Priority will be given to those projects that enhance educational equity for under represented students; strengthen institutional educational capacities; prepare students for careers related to the food, agricultural, and natural resource systems of the United States; and maximize the development and use of resources to improve food and agricultural sciences teaching programs.

Contacts: Dr. Saleia Afele-Faamuli, National Program Leader, Multicultural Alliances; Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service; U.S. Department of Agriculture; 1400 Independence Ave., SW; STOP 2251; Washington, DC 20250-2251; telephone: (202) 720-0384; fax: (202) 720-4924; e-mail:

Hispanic-Serving Institutions Education Grants Program USDA-CSREES-HSI-002011

Due Date for Applications: Jan 30, 2009

Expected Total Number of Awards:

Estimated Total Program Funding: Award Ceiling: $5,700,000 Award Floor: $500,000 URL: http://www.csrees.usda.gov/funding/rfas/hispanic.html

Overview: This competitive grants program is intended to promote and strengthen the ability of Hispanic-Serving Institutions to carry out higher education programs in the food and agricultural sciences. Programs aim to attract outstanding students and produce graduates capable of enhancing the Nation's food and agricultural scientific and professional work force.

Contacts: Dr. Irma A. Lawrence; National Program Leader; Multicultural Alliances; Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service; USDA; 1400 Independence Ave., SW; STOP 2251; Washington, DC 20250-2251; telephone: (202) 720-2082; fax: (202) 720-4924; e-mail: ilawrence@csrees.usda.gov.