External Funding

OPPORTUNITY: Recovery Implementation Fund

FUNDING AGENCY: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)

AWARD AMOUNT: up to $2,000,000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: December 31, 2024

DESCRIPTION: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) Ecological Services Program provides Federal financial assistance on a competitive basis to states, landowners, educators, non-governmental organizations, researchers, and other potential partners to secure information about endangered, threatened or candidate species, to aid in the recovery of these species, pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, and to help conserve the ecosystems upon which these species depend. Program Objective: The principal objective of this Recovery Implementation funding opportunity is to support the implementation of priority recovery actions for federally endangered and threatened species. The ESA conveys the importance of recovery plans as a central organizing tool for guiding each species’ recovery process by requiring their development for every listed species. Recovery plans establish an overall recovery vision that, among other things:

1. Defines the point at which protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) are no longer needed,

2. Identifies and prioritizes the most effective and feasible suite of recovery actions that will promote species survival and recovery,

3. Provides the public and policy makers with an overall estimate of the time and cost to recover species, and the ability to measure success and resources needs, and

4. Aids the Service in working with others to improve the status for imperiled species.

Proposals will be prioritized based on the following:

1. Enhance partnerships with states, non-governmental organizations, private landowners, other Federal agencies, and others,

2. Leverage our resources and authorities with those of our partners, and

3. Highest priority will be given to projects that develop and implement management actions designed to have a direct impact on recovery of listed species (e.g., reduce or eliminate threats).

Examples of such projects may include the following: ● Stabilize endangered and threatened species on the brink of extinction by accomplishing Priority 1 and 2 Recovery Actions ● Achieve downlisting and delisting criteria by accomplishing Priority 3 Recovery Actions ● Contribute information on the species’ current condition, changes from historical to current condition, or predict the species’ response to environmental conditions or conservation efforts. ● Reduce the extinction risk to the species, such that the future condition of the species is likely to improve in terms of representation, resiliency, and/or redundancy

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program (BREP)

FUNDING AGENCY: NOAA

AWARD AMOUNT: $50,000 – $250,000

PRELIMINARY APP DEADLINE: December 13, 2024

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: March 21, 2025

DESCRIPTION: The mission of the National Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program (BREP) is to support the development of technological solutions and changes in fishing practices designed to minimize bycatch of fish and protected species (including Endangered Species Act-listed fish, marine mammals, seabirds, and sea turtles) and to reduce impacts to invertebrates (including sponges, deep-sea corals, and shallow (tropical) corals.) In addition, BREP may support projects that pursue ways to minimize mortality and injury of bycaught species (including post-release injury and mortality). Projects should produce outcomes that can directly influence management needs of federally managed living marine resources.

This grant program provides competitive grants to non-Federal researchers working to benefit U.S. fishermen and fisheries, including aquaculture, through the development of improved fishing practices and innovative gear technologies. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, as amended (MSA), 16 U.S.C. 1865, requires that NOAA’s conservation and management measures minimize bycatch to the extent practicable and established the Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program (BREP) to support the development of technological devices and other conservation engineering changes to minimize bycatch and reduce post-release mortality of non-target species in our nation’s fisheries.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Young Investigator Grant

FUNDING AGENCY: Alex’s Lemonade Stand

AWARD AMOUNT: $180,000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: December 11, 2025

DESCRIPTION: The purpose of the Young Investigator Grant is to find cures and better treatments for childhood cancers by providing support to early career investigators pursuing promising childhood cancer research ideas. These grants aim to cultivate the best and brightest researchers of the future who demonstrate a commitment to a career in pediatric cancer.

ALSF is positioned to invest more into our Young Investigator Program in the coming years by supporting additional high-quality research projects in 2026. Key components of a successful application are a well thought out, robust mentoring and career development plan as well as scientific aims with promise to impact the childhood cancer community.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Coastal Program

FUNDING AGENCY: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)

AWARD AMOUNT: $500,000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: December 31, 2025

DESCRIPTION: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) Coastal Program is a voluntary, community-based program that provides technical and financial assistance through cooperative agreements to coastal communities, conservation partners, and landowners to restore and protect fish and wildlife habitat on public and private lands. The Coastal Program staff coordinates with partners, stakeholders and other Service programs to identify geographic focus areas and develop habitat conservation goals and priorities within these focus areas. Geographic focus areas are where the Coastal Program directs resources to conserve habitat for Federal trust species. Projects are developed in collaboration with partners, and with substantial involvement from Service field staff. Coastal Program projects must support the missions of the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), and the Coastal Program, and be based on biological principles and the best available science.

The Coastal Program takes an adaptive approach to designing and implementing coastal habitat protection and restoration strategies that anticipate and ameriorate the impacts of climate change and other environmental stressors. Coastal Program habitat improvement projects strive to increase coastal resiliency by improving the ability of coastal ecosystems to adapt to environmental changes and supporting natural and nature-based infrastructure projects to protect and enhance coastal habitats.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Accelerating Development of Innovative, Exceptionally Low-Cost Maternal and Child Nutrient Ingredients and Products

FUNDING AGENCY: Gates Foundation

AWARD AMOUNT: Amount Varies

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: December 16, 2025

DESCRIPTION: Malnutrition remains one of the most urgent and pervasive threats to maternal, newborn, and child health in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It contributes to nearly half of all under-five child deaths and is a significant driver of maternal and child morbidity and mortality. During the first 1,000 days of a child’s life (from conception to a child’s second birthday), nutritional deficiencies can cause irreversible physical and cognitive impairments, limiting educational attainment, economic productivity, and lifelong health. In LMICs, where poverty, limited health services, and food insecurity intersect, the burden of malnutrition disproportionately affects the most vulnerable populations, exacerbating inequities and hindering progress toward global development goals.

Targeted interventions that improve maternal nutrition before and during pregnancy are essential for breaking this cycle.

Despite decades of evidence demonstrating the importance of adequate intakes and effectiveness of nutrition interventions, many solutions are inaccessible in LMICs due to high costs of nutrients and final products.

The nutrients we are particularly interested in are calcium, choline, and omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (specifically docosahexaenoic acid – DHA).

NOTE: This is a Gates Foundation “Global Grand Challenges” Grant.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Accelerating Innovation in Vaginal Formulations in Support of Women’s Health

FUNDING AGENCY: Gates Foundation

AWARD AMOUNT: $250,000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: December 16, 2025

DESCRIPTION: Local delivery of drugs into the vagina for prevention and treatment of female-specific conditions remains understudied and under-utilized despite clear potential advantages such as discreetness, potent local efficacy, large surface area for drug absorption, high potential for API dosage sparing, potential for fewer systemic side effects, as well as providing autonomy and empowerment of women. Several key drivers may be responsible for this lag, including paucity of mechanistic biological data, particularly from high-burden settings such as low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), to support the development of specific formulations for vaginal use as well as a persistent misconception that vaginally delivered products may not be embraced by women and their sexual partners. Several of our priorities for impactful products for sexual and reproductive health will require vaginal delivery for immediate, on-demand use. We seek to catalyze the development of innovative technologies and approaches that can safely and effectively deliver a wide range of vaginal products. We expect these approaches to have user appeal, including promotion of self-care capability and other beneficial features that women seek, hence the need to couple discovery research with high-quality end-user input.

NOTE: This is a Gates Foundation “Global Grand Challenges” Grant.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: National Network for Microelectronics Education (NNME) Regional Node Request for Proposals

FUNDING AGENCY: SEMI Foundation

AWARD AMOUNT: $5,000.000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: December 22, 2025

DESCRIPTION: The National Network for Microelectronics Education (NNME), funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by the SEMI Foundation as the National Network Coordination Hub (“Hub Operator”), is soliciting proposals from regional consortia—hereafter referred to as Regional Nodes, or “Nodes”—to accelerate, expand, and improve microelectronics talent development across the United States.

Selected Regional Nodes will serve as collaborative, place-based partnerships that coordinate education, workforce, and industry partners to launch, scale, and deliver high-quality education and training programs aligned with both local and national semiconductor talent needs.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: National Fish Passage Program

FUNDING AGENCY: DOI

AWARD AMOUNT: up to $1,000,000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: December 31, 2025

DESCRIPTION: The National Fish Passage Program (NFPP) provides technical and financial assistance to partners to remove instream barriers and restore aquatic connectivity, improve community safety, and support local economies. Fish passage projects benefit communities by reducing flood risk, improving recreational opportunities, and improving roads while supporting native fish populations and aquatic ecosystems. NFPP project examples include dam removals, culvert replacements, floodplain restoration, and the installation of fishways. The program is delivered through U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) field offices nationwide. Local Service staff work with partners to identify and implement projects. Projects are based on sound science, advance the Service mission, and promote aquatic connectivity.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Geospace Cluster (AGS-GC)

FUNDING AGENCY: NSF

AWARD AMOUNT: Varies

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: Rolling Deadline

DESCRIPTION: The Geospace Cluster (GC) in the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS) supports fundamental and solutions-oriented research, technology development and education related to the Earth’s near-space environment (including the mesosphere, thermosphere, ionosphere, exosphere, magnetosphere and radiation belts) and the inner heliosphere and solar atmosphere. The GC advances knowledge of the Sun–Earth system, including how various parts of the system are coupled through dynamical, electrodynamical and chemical processes. The GC supports research on the societal impacts of these processes including space weather and upper atmosphere climate change, with the aim of increasing resilience to such natural hazards. The GC supports research that uses ground-based or space-based observational facilities and instruments as well as data centers and a broad range of theoretical, modeling, observational, data analyses and laboratory activities.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Analytical Validation of a Candidate Biomarker for Neurological or Neuromuscular Disorders (U01 Clinical Trial Optional)

FUNDING AGENCY: NIH

AWARD AMOUNT: Additional Deadlines: 06/20/25 and into 2026

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: February 21, 2025

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: Deadline Varies

DESCRIPTION: The purpose of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is to support rigorous analytical validation of method(s) used for measuring biomarkers for neurological and neuromuscular disorders for use in clinical trials or clinical practice. Applicants must justify the unmet need for the biomarker(s) and measurement methods and specify one or two context(s) of use for the biomarker(s). Activities supported include optimizing and evaluating the accuracy, precision, reportable range, and analytical sensitivity and specificity of the detection method across multiple sites and operators and establishing reference intervals and quality control procedures. Multi-site applications are expected but not required.

This Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) requires a Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP).

NOTE: TBD

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Infrastructure Cluster (AGS-IC)

FUNDING AGENCY: NSF

AWARD AMOUNT: TBD

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: Rolling Deadline

DESCRIPTION: The Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS) Infrastructure Cluster (IC) is responsible for the oversight of facilities that enable research in the atmospheric and geospace sciences. The IC primarily oversees the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), but it also supports community-based instrumentation and facilities, and data storage and provisioning.

NOTE: Full proposal accepted anytime. Proposals to the Cluster Description are accepted by invitation only. Proposals to specific solicitations, like CIF, FIRP, and DASI should follow those deadlines.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Atmosphere Cluster (AGS-AC)

FUNDING AGENCY: NSF

AWARD AMOUNT: TBD

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: Rolling Deadline

DESCRIPTION: The Atmosphere Cluster (AC) in the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS) supports fundamental studies of atmospheric processes from the Earth’s surface to the stratosphere, and from timescales of nanoseconds to millennia. Core areas of research include the chemical, physical, and dynamical processes in the atmosphere that impact clouds, weather, climate, air quality, and the water cycle. Research methods include modeling, collecting observations, conducting experiments in the laboratory and field, and advancing analytical measurement techniques.

NOTE: Full proposal accepted anytime. Please also refer to the FIRP and P4CLIMATE solicitations for their specific target dates or deadlines.

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: SEEDING CRITICAL ADVANCES FOR LEADING ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES WITH UNTAPPED POTENTIAL (SCALEUP) READY

FUNDING AGENCY: DOE

AWARD AMOUNT: $5,000,000 – $20,000,000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: Rolling Deadline

DESCRIPTION: The Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) Ready program provides a vital mechanism for the support of innovative energy R&D that complements ARPA-E’s primary focus on early-stage transformational energy technologies that require proof of concept.

Technologies that achieve substantial technical advancement under ARPA-E support may still face significant technical and commercial challenges upon completion of an award’s funding period, and thus are at risk of being stranded in their development path once ARPA-E funding ends. Experience across ARPA-E’s diverse energy portfolios, and input from a wide range of investors and industry stakeholders, indicate that pre-commercial scaling projects are critical to establish practical performance and cost parameters. These pre-commercial scaling projects aim to 1) translate the performance achieved at bench scale to commercially scalable versions of the technology, 2) integrate the technology with broader systems, 3) provide extended performance data, and 4) validate the manufacturability and reliability of new energy technologies. Successful scaling projects should enable industry stakeholders to justify the substantial commitments of financial resources, personnel, manufacturing facilities, and materials necessary to subsequently deploy the technologies at a commercial scale.

SCALEUP Ready seeks to scale the most promising technologies previously funded by ARPA-E. The possibility of ARPA-E-funded technologies becoming stranded along their development pathways leaves substantial intellectual property developed with American taxpayer dollars vulnerable to adoption by foreign competitors, who capture it for continued development and economic benefit overseas. This harms national competitiveness, as U.S. industries often fall behind on the development, scaling, and manufacturing of technologies necessary to compete in rapidly evolving global energy markets. Thus, projects selected for SCALEUP Ready will meet ARPA-E’s statutory goals by “accelerating transformational technological advances in areas that industry by itself is not likely to undertake because of technical and financial uncertainty.”1F

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Multilateral Partnerships Leveraging Excellence

FUNDING AGENCY: NSF

AWARD AMOUNT: $200,000 up to 3 yrs

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: Rolling Deadline

DESCRIPTION: The Office of International Science and Engineering’s MultiPLEx program seeks to support visionary, and ambitious international multilateral research partnerships that are required to hasten progress in addressing grand challenges by leveraging research excellence in the U.S. and around the globe. The program also seeks to advance understanding of effective multilateral collaboration.

MultiPLEx welcomes proposals that ● Address urgent research and/or societal challenge of global importance (including but not limited to critical and emerging technology research) and require an inherently international multilateral approach to achieve impactful research results, partnering with at least two countries other than the U.S. Proposals that engage partners across distinct geographic regions are an area of interest. ● Make clear how the proposed international collaboration will enable research advances and broader impacts that go beyond what can be accomplished by a narrower team. ● Include a diverse group of U.S. institutions and/or individuals, leveraging the full range of talent that society has to offer

Solicitation >

OPPORTUNITY: Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program (HEGS)

FUNDING AGENCY: NSF

AWARD AMOUNT: $20,000 – $500,000

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: February 3, 2025

FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE: Deadline Varies

DESCRIPTION: The objective of the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program is to support basic scientific research about the nature, causes, consequences, or evolution of the spatial dimensions of human behaviors, activities, and dynamics as well as their interactions with environmental and social processes across a range of scales. Contemporary geographical research encompasses diverse research traditions and methodologies. Recognizing the breadth of the field’s contributions to science, the HEGS Program welcomes proposals for empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, methodologically rigorous, and generalizable research that advances geographical and geospatial sciences.

Because the National Science Foundation’s mandate is to support fundamental scientific research, the HEGS program cannot fund research that takes as its primary goal humanistic interpretations or findings that are not generalizable or reproducible. HEGS welcomes proposals that utilize quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods in novel ways. However, a proposal that applies geographical or geospatial methods to a geographic problem without proposing how that problem provides an opportunity to make a theory-testing or theory-expanding contribution to geographical science, broadly defined, will be returned without review. HEGS supported projects are expected to yield results that will enhance, expand, and transform fundamental geographical theory and geospatial methods and that will have broader impacts that benefit society.

Generally, successful HEGS proposals should describe clear and detailed plans for data collection (including sample selection if appropriate), justification for proposed methods, plans for data analysis, attention to confounding variables, and efforts to address biases (e.g., confirmatory biases, selection biases, etc.). Competitive HEGS proposals should substantiate the validity of findings and generalizability to broader contexts.

NOTE: Additional Deadline 08/01/2025

Solicitation >