The OFRN Round 5 Sustaining Ohio's Aeronautical Readiness and Innovation in the Next Generation (SOARING) Opportunity Announcement is focused on expanding Ohio's research and development capabilities across the state's academic institutions and business in support of Ohio-based federal partner needs, which ultimately promotes Ohio's economic growth.  OFRN Round 5 Areas of Interest (AOIs) include topics in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), Artificial Intelligence, Human Factors, Data Analytics, Space Commercialization, Quantum Communications and Advanced Power Systems.  This announcement seeks to leverage Ohio's unique research capabilities and its federal partner's expertise to accelerate technology development and innovation by increasing collaboration across government, academic, and industry organizations. 

For FY2021, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Information Science and Engineering (QISE) have been added to the national priority areas in which the NRT Program encourages proposals. We seek proposals on any interdisciplinary research theme of national priority, with special emphasis on AI and QISE and the six research areas within NSF's 10 Big Ideas. The NSF research Big Ideas are Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR), The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF), Navigating the New Arctic (NNA), Windows on the Universe: The Era of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (WoU), The Quantum Leap: Leading the Next Quantum Revolution (QL), and Understanding the Rules of Life: Predicting Phenotype (URoL). Proposals that align with one of these designated priority areas should contain a title to reflect that alignment, as described in the program solicitation (e.g., NRT-AI: title, NRT-HDR: title, NRT-QL: title). Proposals may be submitted under two tracks (i.e., Track 1 and Track 2). Track 1 proposals may request a total budget (up to five years in duration) up to $3 million for projects with a focus on STEM graduate students in research-based PhD and/or master's degree programs. Track 2 proposals may request a total budget (up to five years in duration) up to $2 million; NSF requires that Track 2 proposals focus on programs from institutions not classified as Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activity (R1). Requirements for Track 1 and Track 2 are identical.

The COVID-19 Vaccine Challenge Series aims to find several digital solutions that will help ADB's developing member countries (DMCs) tackle a broad range of challenges as vaccines become available-from vaccine delivery and distribution, to public communication and education, to mobilization and monitoring of healthcare workers and volunteers, as well as safe and efficient administration of COVID-19 vaccines.

"JobsOhio is hosting a town hall meeting to discuss initiatives and strategic assets within the Dayton/Western and Cincinnati/Southwest Ohio region. Join us Thursday, December 17 at 1:30 - 3 p.m. to learn more about our strategy and objectives as well as introduce the advisors and leadership for this sector. JobsOhio's President and CEO, J.P. Nauseef and Managing Director of Military and Federal, Elaine Bryant and will be joined by notable guest speakers who will offer their expertise and alignment on the statewide initiative."

The Pandemic Response Challenge is a $500K, four-month challenge that focuses on the development of data-driven AI systems to predict COVID-19 infection rates and prescribe Intervention Plans (IPs) that regional governments, communities, and organizations can implement to minimize harm when reopening their economies.

The L'Oréal USA For Women in Science fellowship program awards five women postdoctoral scientists annually with grants of $60,000 each for their contributions in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields and commitment to serving as role models for younger generations.

The Farm Business Management and Benchmarking (FBMB) Competitive Grants Program provides funds for improving the farm management knowledge and skills of agricultural producers by maintaining and expanding a national, publicly available farm financial management database to support improved farm management.

The purpose of the 2020 HD4A CFP is primarily to award data access at no cost from one of eight anticipated data providers to successful applicants. Most selected projects will not receive a financial award for personnel or other project-related costs. However, limited funding up to $100,000 per project is available for a small number of projects from principal investigators who have not previously received external research funding.

NineSigma, representing the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), seeks technologies, such as weather prediction, that support decision-making by rice farmers in Senegal. It is desirable for the technologies to be available in areas with narrowband Internet connection and to require no specialist knowledge of information and communication technology. The proof-of-concept (POC) experiments of the technologies will be conducted as part of JICA's research project in collaboration with the National Company of Development and Exploitation of Land in the Delta of Senegal River, and Faleme Valleys (SAED), which is an organization promoting the development of irrigation farming on the left bank of the Senegal River valley, and the JICA Technical Cooperation Project, which provides technical support to SAED. Once the technologies are established after the POC, they may be deployed in Senegal, and in the future, expanded throughout Africa.

NineSigma, representing the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) ("Client"), seeks technologies and solutions to make effective use of tablet computers designed to aid rice production in Senegal. It is desirable that such a solution is applicable for use even where Internet connection is slow, and does not require technological expertise in information technology.  As it is currently planned, verification testing for this project will be conducted in cooperation with the National Company for the Development and Exploitation of the Senegal River Delta, Senegal River and Faleme Valley (SAED), which is an organization responsible for promoting the development of irrigated farming on the left bank of the Senegal River, and a JICA Technical Cooperation project that provides aid to SAED. If the technology is established following the demonstration, it may potentially be applied nationwide in Senegal, as well as across Africa.

The Data Science Corps is one of the components of the HDR ecosystem enabling education and workforce development by focusing on building capacity for harnessing the data revolution at the local, state, and national levels to help unleash the power of data in the service of science and society. The Data Science Corps will provide practical experiences, teach new skills, and offer learning opportunities in different settings. This solicitation prompts the community to envision creative educational pathways that will transform data science education and expand the data science talent pool by enabling the participation of undergraduate and Master's degree students with diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills, and technical maturity in the Data Science Corps. These activities are envisioned to be inherently collaborative, with a lead organization and one or more collaborating organizations.

The RISA program supports the development of knowledge, expertise, and abilities of decision-makers to plan and prepare for climate variability and change. Through regionally-focused and interdisciplinary research and engagement teams, RISA builds and expands the Nation's capacity to adapt and become resilient to extreme weather events and climate change. RISA teams accomplish this through co-developed applied research and partnerships with public and private communities. A central tenet of the RISA program is that learning about climate adaptation and resilience is facilitated by and sustained across a wide range of experts, practitioners, and the public. As such, the RISA program supports a network of people, prioritizing wide participation in learning by doing, learning through adapting, and managing risk with uncertain information. Early decades of the program focused on understanding the use of climate information at regional scales (e.g., through experimental seasonal outlooks), improving predictions and scenarios, building capacity for drought early warning, and advancing the science of climate impact assessments. More recently, emphasis has shifted to address the growing urgency to advance approaches that tackle the complex societal issues surrounding adaptation planning, implementation, and building community resilience. To do so, RISA continues to prioritize collaborative approaches that incorporate multiple knowledge sources and integrate social, physical, and natural science, resulting in long-term support of and increased capacity for communities.

This is one of two virtual OFRN Round 5 funding information sessions before the formal release of the OFRN SOARING Round 5 RFP. Each session will have the same structure. During the session, OFRN will give a brief overview of the pre-release document, and then OFRN federal partner participants will be available to address specific questions relating to the Areas of Interest.

DMREF will support activities that significantly accelerate materials discovery and development by building the fundamental knowledge base needed to advance the design and development of materials with desirable properties or functionality. This will be accomplished through forming interdisciplinary teams of researchers working synergistically in a "closed loop" fashion, building a vibrant research community, leveraging data science, providing ready access to materials data, and educating the future MGI workforce. Achieving this goal could involve some combination of: strategies to advance materials design through testing methodology; theory, modeling, and simulation to predict behavior or assist in analysis of multidimensional input data; and validation through synthesis, growth, processing, characterization, and/or device demonstration.

The Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems (ECCS) Division supports enabling and transformative research that fuels progress in engineering applications with high societal impacts. ECCS programs encompass novel electronic, photonic, and magnetic devices; communication systems, novel integrated circuits, antennas, sensors; machine learning, control, and networks, to name a few. The fundamental research supported by ECCS impacts a wide range of applications such as communications, energy and power, healthcare, environment, transportation, manufacturing, and other areas. ECCS strongly emphasizes the integration of education into its research programs to support the preparation of a diverse and professionally skilled workforce. ECCS also strengthens its programs through links to other areas of engineering, science, industry, government, and international collaborations. The Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams (ASCENT) program is a strategic investment of ECCS that emphasizes new collaboration modalities among the various ECCS supported sub-disciplines. ASCENT encourages robust collaborations between the devices, circuits, algorithmic, and network research communities to develop innovative projects. ASCENT seeks proposals that are bold and ground-breaking transcending the perspectives and approaches typical of disciplinary research efforts. ASCENT projects are expected to lead to disruptive technologies or nucleate entirely new research fields motivated by the most pressing societal challenges the global community faces.

The DOE SC program in Basic Energy Sciences (BES) hereby announces its interest in receiving new and renewal applications from small groups (2-3 principal investigators) and integrated multidisciplinary teams (typically from multiple institutions) in Computational Chemical Sciences (CCS). Single-investigator applications are not responsive to the objectives of this FOA. CCS will support basic research to develop validated, open-source codes for modeling and simulation of complex chemical processes and phenomena that allow full use of emerging exascale and future planned DOE leadership-class computing capabilities. The focus for CCS is on developing capabilities that allow modeling and simulation of new or previously inaccessible complex chemical systems and/or provide dramatic improvement in fidelity, scalability, and throughput. Teams should bring together expertise in domain areas (e.g., electronic structure, chemical dynamics, statistical mechanics, etc.) and other areas important to advance computational tools such as data science, algorithm development, and software architectures. Priority will be given to efforts that address reaction chemistry across multiple scales in complex environments important in geosciences, catalysis, biochemistry, or electrochemistry. CCS will continue to support the DOE Exascale Computing Initiative (ECI). The ECI aims to accelerate the research and development needed to overcome key exascale challenges and maximize benefits of high-performance computing. This funding opportunity continues the BES commitment to ECI by developing open-source codes that can take full advantage of emerging exascale and future planned DOE leadership-class computing facilities.

The NSF Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) in collaboration with AAAS will offer an Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR) webinar focusing on opportunities for funding in the IUSE: EHR program, specifically associated with the Institutional and Community Transformation (ICT) track of the IUSE program. An audio archive and slides will be posted after the webinar at https://aaas-iuse.org. The IUSE: EHR program "seeks to promote novel, creative, and transformative approaches to generating and using new knowledge about STEM teaching and learning to improve STEM education for all undergraduates." The program supports proposals interested in improving undergraduate education, developing faculty expertise, preparing K-12 teachers, and providing all undergraduate students with STEM competencies and a basic understanding of STEM concepts and principles. All projects must contribute to the body of knowledge about what works in undergraduate STEM education and the conditions that lead to improved STEM teaching and learning. The ICT track seeks to fund innovative work on systemic change that may be measured at the departmental, institutional, or multi-institutional level, or across communities of STEM educators and/or educational researchers. ICT projects are expected to include one or more theories of change to guide the proposed work and this webinar will provide information about expectations for Identifying and incorporating these theories of change.

The NSF Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) in collaboration with AAAS will offer an Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR) webinar focusing on opportunities for funding in the IUSE: EHR program, specifically associated with expectations of the new IUSE solicitation, NSF 19-601. An audio archive and slides will be posted after the webinar at https://aaas-iuse.org. The IUSE: EHR program "seeks to promote novel, creative, and transformative approaches to generating and using new knowledge about STEM teaching and learning to improve STEM education for all undergraduates." The program supports proposals interested in improving undergraduate education, developing faculty expertise, preparing K-12 teachers, and providing all undergraduate students with STEM competencies and a basic understanding of STEM concepts and principles. All projects must contribute to the body of knowledge about what works in undergraduate STEM education and the conditions that lead to improved STEM teaching and learning. 

The OFRN Round 5 Opportunity Announcement is focused on expanding Ohio's research and development capabilities across the state's academic institutions and business in support of Ohio-based federal partner needs, which ultimately promotes Ohio's economic growth. OFRN Round 5 Areas of Interest (AOIs) include topics in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), Artificial Intelligence, Human Factors, Data Analytics and Space Commercialization. This announcement seeks to leverage Ohio's unique research capabilities and its federal partner's expertise to accelerate technology development and innovation by increasing collaboration across government, academic, and industry organizations. The Round 5 Opportunity Announcement is subject to funding availability based upon a pending review and final determination of the Program Objectives from the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE). This is a Pre-Release notification and NOT a formal solicitation.

NOTE: Webpage provides information about general webinar and BIO Directorate breakout. If you are interested in breakouts for other directorates, contact Heather Johnston (johnsthb@MiamiOH.edu) in Research & Innovation for information. On Wednesday, November 4, 2020 and Thursday, November 5, 2020, NSF will host outreach webinars with information about the Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure (Mid-scale RI)-1 funding opportunity (NSF 21-505). The Mid-scale RI Big Idea is intended to provides an agile, Foundation-wide process to fund experimental research capabilities in the mid-scale range ($6 million to $100 million), between the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and Major Facilities thresholds.  Recently, the solicitation (NSF 21-505) for the Mid-scale RI-1 program (for infrastructure with total project cost of $6 million up until, but not including, $20 million) was published with a deadline of January 7, 2021 for preliminary proposals. Each session will begin at 1:00 p.m. EST and have two parts: a general Mid-scale RI-1 information session (1:00 p.m. -1:40 p.m. EST) with Q&A followed by Directorate-specific breakouts (1:45 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. EST) where more technical questions will be addressed. The information presented on Day 1 will be the same as the information presented on Day 2.