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The Biotechnology, Biochemical, and Biomass Engineering (BBBE) program supports fundamental engineering research that advances the understanding of cellular and biomolecular processes (in vivo, in vitro, and/or ex vivo) and eventually leads to the development of enabling technology and/or applications in support of the biopharmaceutical, biotechnology, and bioenergy industries, or with applications in health or the environment.  Quantitative assessments of bioprocesses are considered vital to successful research projects in the BBBE program.  Fundamental to many research projects in this area is the understanding of how biomolecules and cells interact in their environment, and how those molecular level interactions lead to changes in structure, function, phenotype, and/or behavior.  The program encourages proposals that address emerging research areas and technologies that effectively integrate knowledge and practices from different disciplines, and effectively incorporate ongoing research into educational activities. Research projects of particular interest in BBBE include, but are not limited to: Metabolic engineering and synthetic biology Quantitative systems biotechnology Tissue engineering and stem cell culture technologies Protein engineering/protein design Development of novel "omics" tools for biotechnology applications

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites cooperative agreement applications that will contribute to a higher resolution understanding of the physical and functional organization of the human islet tissue environment by describing the composition (cellular and molecular) and function of important components of the pancreatic islet and peri-islet tissue architecture, the cell-cell relationships and means of communications used by cell types and cell subtypes within the pancreatic tissue ecosystem, and/or the contribution of adjacent (including acinar, ductal, lymphatic) and neighboring (intestinal, mesenteric and adipose) tissues to islet cell function and dysfunction. Successful projects will integrate the Human Pancreas Analysis Consortium (HPAC), that will consist of the research teams funded in response to this FOA with the Human Pancreas Analysis Program (HPAP), a resource-generation program that was funded in 2016 in response to RFA-DK-15-027. HPAC will become the fifth consortium of the Human Islet Research Network (HIRN, https://hirnetwork.org/ ). HIRN's overall mission is to support innovative and collaborative translational research to understand how human beta cells are lost in T1D, and to find innovative strategies to protect and replace functional beta cell mass in humans. This FOA will only support studies with a primary focus on increasing our understanding of human tissue structure and function, and human disease biology (as opposed to rodent or other animal models). This FOA is not intended to support the conduct of a clinical trial.

The CZI Neurodegeneration Challenge Network has three goals: (1) to make fundamental advances toward understanding neurodegeneration; (2) to bring new ideas and talent to the field of neurodegeneration; and (3) to encourage a new type of interdisciplinary collaborative research involving scientists, clinicians and engineers. We invite applications to join the Neurodegeneration Challenge Network through two RFA mechanisms: CZI Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Awards: five-year investigator grants for early career academic investigators, with an emphasis on those who are new to the field of neurodegeneration. We seek to empower investigators to pursue bold ideas and to take risks within a supportive and collaborative environment. Awardees will benefit from mentorship support, as well as professional development, training and network opportunities, and practical career guidance to help them navigate this early stage of their careers. It is with great pleasure that we name this Award in memory of Dr. Ben Barres. Through his research career and his life and humanity, Ben embodied both the spirit and the scientific aims of this Award and the Challenge Network approach. CZI Collaborative Science Awards: three-year grants for small group interdisciplinary collaborations. At least one member of the collaboration should be a physician with active clinical engagement in an area relevant to the proposal. These grants are aimed to support innovative, bold, high risk/high impact projects at the interface of basic and disease biology. The scope of these collaborations should focus on foundational science (as opposed to translation and clinical application), aligned with clinical context.

The purpose of this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is twofold: 1. to accelerate translational and clinical Phase I and II a/b safety and efficacy studies for substantiating measurable functional benefits of probiotic/prebiotic components and/or their combinations; and; 2. to understand the underlying mechanisms of their action(s), and variability in responses to these interventions. This FOA calls for interdisciplinary collaborations across scientific disciplines engaged in microbiome and pro/prebiotic research including, but not limited to: nutritional science, microbiology, virology, microecology and microbiome, genomics, immunology, computational biology, chemistry, bioengineering, as well as integration of omics and computational approaches in DNA technologies.

Pandemics have far reaching consequences that range from deaths to shutting down the economy as we have witnessed during the recent COVID19 crisis. Hence there is a need to be better prepared for such pandemics. We need to solve problems ranging from predictive analytics innovative devices for saving lives to technology for devising voting machines. The social and economic impact for the above areas is huge and some of the work can be transformative and save lives. Areas of interest to us include, but are not limited to: - Mathematical models for spread and the impact of pandemics. - Scalable simulation techniques for pandemics (e.g. with multi agents). - Biomedical/Nano sensor devices for detecting symptoms and agents. - Algorithms for rapid exploration of the drug screening and discovery workflows (e.g. use reinforcement learning) - Advanced computational biology techniques for sequencing, detecting viral evolution (e.g. in COVID-19). - Algorithms and systems for contact tracing (with privacy preserving). - Algorithms and recommendation systems for curating media and news. - Collaboration techniques for more effective health, and efficiency during pandemics. Improved identity and security techniques. - Distributed Ledgers, their applications and their governance for and during pandemics. - Pandemic data science - understanding the patterns and the impact of a pandemic like COVID-10. Creation of curated data sets. We are interested in both the science and technology aspects of these problem sets, and, particularly, in the intersections between them.