The U.S. National Science Foundation today released 12 new notices of funding opportunity (NOFOs) providing over $1.5 billion for foundational research, including basic and use-inspired inquiry across the sciences and engineering.
These funding opportunities support the foremost goal in the administration's memorandum "Ushering in a New Golden Age of American Innovation: Fiscal Year 2028 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities" which calls for investing in the foundational research that remains the bedrock of American science and technology leadership. They also deliver on a central premise of the report Science: A New Golden Age - that America must respond to the forces reshaping the scientific enterprise and create conditions in which exceptional science can occur more often and progress more rapidly. Rather than treating every research question alike, NSF will take a portfolio-based approach to federal grantmaking that deliberately matches funding mechanisms, institutional models, research modalities and grant durations to the character of the research. NOFOs announced today will support a mix of long-horizon awards for ambitious, transformative research and rapid short-term grants to quickly test promising ideas.
NOFOs advance NSF's core mission to support foundational research that leads to scientific breakthroughs and opens new frontiers of knowledge. NSF investments in foundational research underpin technological innovation across industries, strengthening U.S. economic competitiveness, enhancing national security and improving quality of life for all Americans. The funding opportunities place particular emphasis on bold, paradigm-challenging inquiry, foundational research that forges new connections across disciplines, and projects that harness artificial intelligence, advanced computation and automation to make qualitatively new science possible.
"America's scientific enterprise is shaped by how we empower researchers to explore the frontiers of discovery," said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. "The investment that we are announcing today will enable researchers to accelerate fundamental research, giving rise to the transformational breakthroughs that will power our future."
"In Science: A New Golden Age, the administration made foundational research in the sciences and engineering a national priority," said Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "NSF's investments today ensure the United States continues to drive the scientific breakthroughs that underpin the industries of the future and will support a wider range of meritorious science by matching the size, speed and duration of an award to the character of the research it supports."
The new opportunities reflect a wider range of R&D funding mechanisms so that the structure of an award better fits the research it is intended to support. Where scientifically justified, researchers are encouraged to request awards of up to five years of support for long-term, ambitious research questions, allowing them to focus on truly paradigm-shifting research instead of producing incremental results to secure the next award. To rapidly test and de-risk novel ideas, researchers are also encouraged to make greater use of NSF's existing rapid, short-term grant mechanisms.
Many of the new funding opportunities will also enable structured experiments in how NSF supports discovery. NSF plans to rigorously assess and validate whether changes in proposal design, award duration, review methods and funding speed improve the quality and ambition of scientific results. NSF plans to scale these changes over the long term as appropriate, building the metascience capabilities and self-improving scientific enterprise called for in the administration's FY 2028 R&D budget priorities memorandum.
The new solicitations are shorter, fewer in number and easier to navigate, opening NSF's funding opportunities to a broader cross-section of the nation and advancing NSF's ongoing efforts to reduce paperwork burden. They also complement NSF's announcement last winter that the agency is piloting changes to the merit review process, including new mechanisms to surface unconventional proposals that may not advance through traditional consensus-driven review panels. Early-career researchers are especially encouraged to apply across funding opportunities.
View the full list of new funding opportunities.
