Call for Proposals: Dear Colleague Letter – Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI)

CFP Name: Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) – Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI)

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

Important Dates:

• Conference Proposal Submissions Due: Nov 23, 2020
• EAGER Proposal Submissions Due: Dec 8, 2020
• Full Proposal Submissions Due: Jan 15, 2021

Submission: Click to LEARN MORE.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) seeks to stimulate fundamental exploratory, potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure, whether it be physical, cyber, or social, provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. In particular, knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes are essential to efforts to envision, build, and maintain an effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

This Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) invites workshop and Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) proposals that incorporate scientific insights about human behavior and social dynamics to better develop, design, build, rehabilitate, and maintain strong and effective American infrastructure. (Workshops associated with this DCL are identified as Conference proposals in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) and will hereafter be referred to as “conferences.”) The DCL is intended to support exploratory work, in its early stages, on untested but potentially transformative research ideas or approaches that can identify and help build this new area of research. The activities NSF hopes to stimulate with this DCL may be considered especially “high risk – high reward” in the sense that the Foundation seeks radically different approaches, application of new expertise, or engagement of novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.

Inquiries about the DCL, general inquiries, and questions about submission of SAI proposals should be directed to NSF-SAI@nsf.gov.