OARS funding Behavior

The Science of Science:Discovery, Communication, and Impact (SoS:DCI) program is designed to increase the public value of scientific activity. The program pursues this goal by supporting basic research in three fundamental areas: How to increase the rate of socially beneficial discovery; How to improve science communication outcomes; and How to expand the societal benefits of scientific activity.

The Law & Science Program at the National Science Foundation supports social scientific studies of law and law-like systems of rules. Successful proposals describe research that advances scientific theory and understanding of the connections between human behavior and law, legal institutions, or legal processes, as well as studies of how science and technology are applied in legal contexts. The Law & Science Program funds the best proposals submitted within the field broadly defined, regardless of specific subfield, and strives to support a multi- and interdisciplinary community of scholars studying relevant topics. The Law & Science Program supports Standard Research Grants and Grants for Collaborative Research, Conference proposals, and Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement proposals.

Over the last decade, SBE has actively encouraged and supported communities to develop visions, teams, and capabilities dedicated to the creation of new, large-scale, next-generation data resources and relevant analytic techniques to advance fundamental research in the SBE sciences. This has been done both through the NSF 14-517 Building Community and Capacity for Data-Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and in Education and Human Resources (BCC-SBE/EHR) competition and other mechanisms, such as NSF 17-594 Research Coordination Networks (RCNs). In 2015 SBE began the Resource Implementations for Data Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (RIDIR) competition. The current solicitation seeks to build upon those earlier efforts and extends the data infrastructure focus of the former RIDIR competition for the coming year.

The program supports research addressing learning in individuals and in groups, across a wide range of domains at one or more levels of analysis including: molecular/cellular mechanisms; brain systems; cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes; and social/cultural influences. The program also supports research on augmented intelligence that clearly articulates principled ways in which human approaches to learning and related processes, such as in design, complex decision-making and problem-solving, can be improved through interactions with others, and/or the use of artificial intelligence in technology. These could include ways of using knowledge about human functioning to improve the design of collaborative technologies that have capabilities to learn to adapt to humans. For both aspects of the program, there is special interest in collaborative and collective models of learning and/or intelligence that are supported by the unprecedented speed and scale of technological connectivity. This includes emphasis on how people and technology working together in new ways and at scale can achieve more than either can attain alone. The program also seeks explanations for how the emergent intelligence of groups, organizations, and networks intersects with processes of learning, behavior and cognition in individuals.

Through the program, grants will be awarded to graduate students, medical students, and postdoctoral fellows in support of training in basic and clinical research relevant to autism spectrum disorders. The foundation will consider all areas of related basic and clinical research, including but not limited to human behavior across the lifespan (language, learning, behavior, communication, social function, motor skills and planning, epilepsy, sleep, repetitive disorders); neurobiology (anatomy, development, neuroimaging); pharmacology; behavioral intervention; neuropathology; genetics and gene/environment interactions; epigenetics; genomics; epigenomics; immunology; molecular and cellular mechanisms; studies employing model organisms and systems; and studies of treatment and service delivery.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites applications from clinical investigators to participate in the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN) and contribute to the network's capacity to respond to urgent public health needs. NIDA intends to continue to develop and test interventions for addressing the wide spectrum of substance use problems via collaborative partnerships among NIDA, clinical research investigators, healthcare providers, and healthcare institutions.   

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) announces the availability of support for collaborative research by multi-disciplinary teams which is of high priority to NIDA and leads to synergistic outcomes based on the synthesis of multiple research approaches. The NIDA Program Projects funding opportunity will support research in which the funding of three or more highly meritorious projects as a group enriches both the component projects and the overall program to offer significant scientific advantages over supporting the same projects as individual research grants (i.e., synergy). For the duration of the award, each Program must consist of a minimum of three research projects focused on issues critical to advance the mission and goals of NIDA. 

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide strong predictive value along with mechanistic understanding of AI by combining machine learning techniques with effective explanatory techniques. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) solicits applications in the area of XAI applied to neuroscientific questions of encoding, decoding, and modulation of neural circuits linked to behavior. This FOA encourages collaborations between computationally and experimentally-focused investigators. This FOA seeks the development of machine learning algorithms that are able to mechanistically explain how experimental manipulations affect cognitive, affective, or social processing in humans or animals. Proof-of-concept applications aimed at improving the current state of the technology that uses XAI to provide unbiased, hierarchical explanations of causal relationships between complex neural and behavioral data are also appropriate .

The goal of this FOA is to support short courses geared to behavioral and social scientists who have existing expertise in aging research and can make research contributions in Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's disease-related dementias (AD/ADRD) with additional knowledge about the disease and related research resources. Fields of behavioral and social science research relevant for this FOA are health economics, labor economics, health services research, healthcare policy, public policy, demography, sociology, social epidemiology, psychology, and social neuroscience. Priority areas of focus include, but are not limited to, the following: dementia care; dementia caregiver research; cognitive and dementia epidemiology; behavioral and social pathways of AD/ADRD; role of social, contextual, environmental, and institutional factors in AD/ADRD; early psychological changes preceding AD/ADRD onset; prevention of AD/ADRD; disparities in AD/ADRD or dementia-related outcomes; and research resources and methods for studying the determinants and impact of AD/ADRD.

The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to invite applications proposing the innovative analysis of existing social science, behavioral, administrative, and neuroimaging data to study the etiology and epidemiology of drug using behaviors (defined as alcohol, tobacco, prescription and other drug) and related disorders, prevention of drug use and HIV, and health service utilization. This FOA encourages the analyses of public use and other extant community-based or clinical datasets to their full potential in order to increase our knowledge of etiology, trajectories of drug using behaviors and their consequences including morbidity and mortality, risk and resilience in the development of psychopathology, strategies to guide the development, testing, implementation, and delivery of high quality, effective and efficient services for the prevention and treatment of drug abuse and HIV.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites grant applications for the Outstanding Investigator Award (R35) in any area of cancer research. The objective of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Outstanding Investigator Award (OIA) is to provide long-term support to accomplished investigators with outstanding records of cancer research productivity who propose to conduct exceptional research. The OIA is intended to allow investigators the opportunity to take greater risks, be more adventurous in their lines of inquiry, or take the time to develop new techniques. The OIA would allow an Institution to submit applications nominating established Program Directors/Principal Investigators (PDs/PIs) for the NCI OIA. It is expected that the OIA would provide extended funding stability and encourage investigators to embark on projects of unusual potential in cancer research. The research projects should break new ground or extend previous discoveries toward new directions or applications that may lead to a breakthrough that will advance biomedical, behavioral, or clinical cancer research.

Through this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announces its interest in supporting meritorious research projects in three distinct domains related to cancer communication: 1) the utility and application of new cancer communication surveillance approaches; 2) the development and testing of rapid cancer communication interventions using innovative methods and designs; and 3) the development and testing of multilevel cancer communication models emphasizing bidirectional influence between levels. For such projects, applicants should apply communication science approaches to the investigation of behavioral targets and health outcomes related to cancer prevention and control. Applications should utilize one or more innovative communication research methodologies.

Through this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announces its interest in supporting meritorious research projects in three distinct domains related to cancer communication: 1) the utility and application of new cancer communication surveillance approaches; 2) the development and testing of rapid cancer communication pilot interventions using innovative methods and designs; and 3) the development and testing of multilevel cancer communication models emphasizing bidirectional influence between levels. For such projects, applicants should apply communication science approaches to the investigation of behavioral targets and health outcomes related to cancer prevention and control. Applications should utilize one or more innovative communication research methodologies.

EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide strong predictive value along with mechanistic understanding by combining machine learning techniques with effective explanatory techniques. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) solicits applications in the area of XAI applied to neuroscientific questions of encoding, decoding, and modulation of neural circuits linked to behavior. This FOA encourages collaborations between computationally and experimentally-focused investigators. This FOA seeks machine learning algorithms able to mechanistically explain how experimental manipulations can improve cognitive, affective, or social processing in humans or animals. Proof-of-concept applications aimed at improving the current state of the technology that use XAI to provide unbiased, hierarchical explanations of causal relationships between complex neural and behavioral data are also responsive.

The multi-agency Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program supports research on the ecological, evolutionary, and social drivers that influence the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. The central theme of submitted projects must be the quantitative or computational understanding of pathogen transmission dynamics. The intent is discovery of principles of infectious disease transmission and testing mathematical or computational models that elucidate infectious disease systems. Projects should be broad, interdisciplinary efforts that go beyond the scope of typical studies. They should focus on the determinants and interactions of transmission among humans, non-human animals, and/or plants. This includes, for example, the spread of pathogens; the influence of environmental factors such as climate; the population dynamics and genetics of reservoir species or hosts; the feedback between ecological transmission and evolutionary dynamics; and the cultural, social, behavioral, and economic dimensions of pathogen transmission. Research may be on zoonotic, environmentally-borne, vector-borne, or enteric pathogens of either terrestrial or aquatic systems and organisms, including diseases of animals and plants, at any scale from specific pathogens to inclusive environmental systems.

NOAA's Office of Weather and Air Quality (OWAQ) is soliciting proposals for weather, air quality, and earth-system modeling research reflecting multiple science objectives spanning time scales from hours to seasons, and from weather and water observations and earth system modeling to social and behavioral science. There will be three grant competitions from this notification valued at approximately $7,000,000 as follows: 1) Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI), 2) Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment - Southeast U.S. (VORTEX-SE), and 3) Climate Testbed (CTB). In alignment with the Weather Forecasting and Innovation Act of 2017 (Public Law 115-25), the funded projects should improve NOAA's understanding and ultimately its services of weather and water forecasting through engagement with the external scientific community on key science gaps of mutual interest. Through this funding opportunity, NOAA will support new weather, water, climate, earth system, and air quality observing and forecasting applications, including improved analysis techniques, better statistical or dynamic forecast models and techniques, and communication of that information to better inform the public.

The Kitsap Community Foundation in Silverdale, Washington, has announced that it has an additional $90,000 to award in 2019 to small and medium-sized 501(c)(3) organizations doing work in the fields of behavioral health and health equity in Kitsap and North Mason counties. The new grant money was made available by Premera Blue Cross as part of Premera's Social Impact Program. Recognizing the important connection between behavioral health and overall health, Premera Blue Cross launched the program with the aim of supporting behavioral health issues, particularly in underserved communities. The program currently supports sixty-four evidence‐based programs and pilot projects with the potential for significant impact in Washington state and Alaska, and the focus of those programs and pilots, for the most part, is on prevention rather than intervention. Indeed, the foundation and Premera believe that by addressing behavioral health issues - especially for populations where community health data consistently shows treatment disparities exist - overall community health will improve. Grant amounts will range between $5,000 and $15,000, and priority will be given to proposals that serve underserved communities, including people of color, low‐income populations, rural populations, and children who have experienced adverse childhood experiences. Grant funds must be used during the 2020 calendar year.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is accepting applications for fiscal year (FY) 2019 Mental and Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Practitioner Data grant. The purpose of this program is to provide comprehensive data and analysis on individuals who comprise the prevention and treatment fields to address mental and substance use disorders. The goal of the program is to provide valid data on the existing practitioners and usable information to SAMHSA on which to make policy and planning decisions.

To that end, the foundation is inviting applications to its annual Bridge to Independence Award Program. Created in 2015, the program promotes talented early-career scientists by facilitating their transition to research independence and providing grant funding at the start of their professorships. Through the program, grants of $495,000 over three years will be awarded to senior postdoctoral fellows who intend to seek a tenure-track faculty position during the upcoming academic year. The award will be activated upon assumption of a tenure-track professorship at a U.S. or Canadian research institution.

In today's increasingly networked, distributed, and asynchronous world, cybersecurity involves hardware, software, networks, data, people, and integration with the physical world. Society's overwhelming reliance on this complex cyberspace, however, has exposed its fragility and vulnerabilities that defy existing cyber-defense measures; corporations, agencies, national infrastructure and individuals continue to suffer cyber-attacks. Achieving a truly secure cyberspace requires addressing both challenging scientific and engineering problems involving many components of a system, and vulnerabilities that stem from human behaviors and choices. Examining the fundamentals of security and privacy as a multidisciplinary subject can lead to fundamentally new ways to design, build and operate cyber systems, protect existing infrastructure, and motivate and educate individuals about cybersecurity.