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The STEM-C (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, including Computing) Partnerships program is a major research and development effort of two NSF Directorates, the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) and the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), which supports innovative partnerships to improve teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. STEM-C Partnerships combines and advances the efforts of both the former Math and Science Partnership (MSP) and the former Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) programs. 

The STEM-C (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, including Computing) Partnerships program is a major research and development effort of two NSF Directorates, the Directorate for Education and Human Resources and the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, which supports innovative partnerships to improve teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. STEM-C Partnerships combines and advances the efforts of both the former Math and Science Partnership (MSP) and the former Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) programs.

AAAS offers fellowships in nine programmatic areas. Specific host offices and assignments vary from year to year. Congressional Diplomacy, Security& Development Energy, Environment & Agriculture Health, Education & Human Services Big Data & Analytics Judicial Branch Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship AAAS Overseas Fellowships at USAID Missions (limited eligibility) Global Health & Development Fellowships (limited eligibility)

The Research on Education and Learning (REAL) program represents the substantive foci of three previous EHR programs: Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE), Research in Disabilities Education (RDE), and Research on Gender in Science and Engineering (GSE). What is distinctive about the new REAL program is the emphasis placed on the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to (a) understand, (b) build theory to explain, and (c) suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation. The program supports advances in research on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning and education by fostering efforts to explore all aspects of education research from foundational knowledge to improvements in STEM learning and learning contexts, both formal and informal, from childhood through adulthood, for all groups, and from the earliest developmental stages of life through participation in the workforce, resulting in increased public understanding of science and engineering. The REAL program will fund research on, human learning in STEM; learning in STEM learning environments, and broadening participation research.

The Research on Education and Learning (REAL) program represents the substantive foci of three previous EHR programs: Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE), Research in Disabilities Education (RDE), and Research on Gender in Science and Engineering (GSE). What is distinctive about the new REAL program is the emphasis placed on the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to (a) understand, (b) build theory to explain, and (c) suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation. The program supports advances in research on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning and education by fostering efforts to explore all aspects of education research from foundational knowledge to improvements in STEM learning and learning contexts, both formal and informal, from childhood through adulthood, for all groups, and from the earliest developmental stages of life through participation in the workforce, resulting in increased public understanding of science and engineering. The REAL program will fund research on, human learning in STEM; learning in STEM learning environments, and broadening participation research.

Through the SEES Fellows Program, NSF seeks to advance science, engineering, and education to inform the societal actions needed for environmental and economic sustainability and human well-being while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. The Program's emphasis is to facilitate investigations that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and address issues of sustainability through a systems approach, building bridges between academic inquiry, economic growth, and societal needs. The Fellow's proposed investigation must be interdisciplinary and allow him/her to obtain research experiences beyond his/her current core disciplinary expertise. Fellows are required to develop a research partnership(s) that will advance and broaden the impact/scope of the proposed research, and present a plan for their own professional development in the area of sustainability science and engineering.

The Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) is a Presidential award established by the White House in 1995. The PAESMEM program is administered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on behalf of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Nominations, including self-nominations, are invited for "Individual" and "Organizational" PAESMEM awards. Individuals and organizations in all public and private sectors are eligible including industry, academia, K-12, military and government, non-profit organizations, and foundations. Nominations are encouraged from all geographical regions in the U.S. including its territories and particularly jurisdictions designated by Congress under NSF's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). NSFEPSCoR-designated jurisdictions are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virgin Islands, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Each "Individual" or "Organizational" PAESMEM awardee will receive a $10,000award and a commemorative Presidential certificate. Awardees are also invited to participate in an award recognitionceremony in Washington, DC which includes meetings with STEM educators, researchers and policy leaders. Up to 16 awards may be made from the nominations received on or beforeJune 19, 2015. PAESMEM awardees serve as leaders in the national effort to develop fully the nation's human resources in STEM. To locate PAESMEM awardees in your state, please visit PAESMEM.net.

Building on previous investments, the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) and the Directorate for Education & Human Resources (EHR) announce their interest in stimulating research related to the Science of Broadening Participation (SBP). The Science of Broadening Participation will employ the theories, methods, and analytic techniques of the social, behavioral, economic, and learning sciences to better understand the barriers that hinder and factors that enhance our ability to broaden participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The results of these efforts will inform approaches to increase the access, involvement, and retention of underrepresented groups in STEM and to strengthen our national STEM capabilities and competitive advantage. Ultimately, the SBP research will provide scientific evidence that STEM educators, STEM employers, and policy makers need to make informed decisions and to design effective programs and interventions.

Through the SEES Fellows Program, NSF seeks to advance science, engineering, and education to inform the societal actions needed for environmental and economic sustainability and human well-being while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges.  The Program's emphasis is to facilitate investigations that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and address issues of sustainability through a systems approach, building bridges between academic inquiry, economic growth, and societal needs.  The Fellow's proposed investigation must be interdisciplinary and allow him/her to obtain research experiences beyond his/her current core disciplinary expertise.  Fellows are required to develop a research partnership(s) that will advance and broaden the impact/scope of the proposed research, and present a plan for their own professional development in the area of sustainability science and engineering.  Proposals with a primary focus on topics covered by the Directorate for Engineering (ENG) are considered "out of scope" for this revised solicitation; however, proposals may include such topics as a secondary (or tertiary) focus.

The NASA Office of Education, in cooperation with NASA Headquarters' Offices of Communications, Chief Scientist, and Chief Technologist, the Mission Directorates (i.e., Aeronautics Research, Human Exploration and Operations, Science, and Space Technology), and Mission Support Directorate is issuing this NASA Research Announcement (NRA or solicitation) to solicit proposals to support NASA-inspired S-STEM informal education projects, including exhibits, through partnerships with K-12 schools or districts, youth-serving organizations, higher education, and/or other agencies to support Federal STEM education goals. Successful proposals typically will be funded as grants or cooperative agreements depending on the size and complexity of the proposed project.

All of comparative biology depends on knowledge of the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) of living and extinct organisms. In addition, understanding biodiversity and how it changes over time is only possible when Earth's diversity is organized into a phylogenetic framework. The goals of the Genealogy of Life (GoLife) program are to resolve the phylogenetic history of life and to integrate this genealogical architecture with underlying organismal data. The ultimate vision of this program is an open access, universal Genealogy of Life that will provide the comparative framework necessary for testing questions in systematics, evolutionary biology, ecology, and other fields. A further strategic integration of this genealogy of life with data layers from genomic, phenotypic, spatial, ecological and temporal data will produce a grand synthesis of biodiversity and evolutionary sciences. The resulting knowledge infrastructure will enable synthetic research on biological dynamics throughout the history of life on Earth, within current ecosystems, and for predictive modeling of the future evolution of life.Projects submitted to this program should emphasize increased efficiency in contributing to a complete Genealogy of Life and integration of various types of organismal data with phylogenies.This program also seeks to broadly train next generation, integrative phylogenetic biologists, creating the human resource infrastructure and workforce needed to tackle emerging research questions in comparative biology. Projects should train students for diverse careers by exposing them to the multidisciplinary areas of research within the proposal.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, and potentially transformative models for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduate education training. The NRT program seeks proposals that explore ways for graduate students in research-based master's and doctoral degree programs to develop the skills, knowledge, and competencies needed to pursue a range of STEM careers. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas, through the use of a comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. Proposals are requested in any interdisciplinary or convergent research theme of national priority, with special emphasis on the research areas in 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). The NRT program addresses workforce development, emphasizing broad participation, and institutional capacity building needs in graduate education.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, and potentially transformative models for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduate education training. The NRT program seeks proposals that explore ways for graduate students in research-based master's and doctoral degree programs to develop the skills, knowledge, and competencies needed to pursue a range of STEM careers. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas, through the use of a comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. Proposals are requested in any interdisciplinary or convergent research theme of national priority, with special emphasis on the research areas in 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).

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.

A grand challenge in computing is the creation of machines that can proactively interpret and learn from data in real time, solve unfamiliar problems using what they have learned, and operate with the energy efficiency of the human brain. While complex machine-learning algorithms and advanced electronic hardware (henceforth referred to as 'hardware') that can support large-scale learning have been realized in recent years and support applications such as speech recognition and computer vision, emerging computing challenges require real-time learning, prediction, and automated decision-making in diverse domains such as autonomous vehicles, military applications,healthcare informatics and business analytics. A salient feature of these emerging domains is the large and continuously streaming data sets that these applications generate, which must be processed efficiently enough to support real-time learning and decision making based on these data. This challenge requires novel hardware techniques and machine-learning architectures.This solicitation seeks to lay the foundation for next-generation co-design of RTML algorithms and hardware, with the principal focus on developing novel hardware architectures and learning algorithms in which all stages of training (including incremental training, hyperparameter estimation, and deployment) can be performed in real time. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are teaming up through this Real-Time Machine Learning (RTML) program to explore high-performance, energy-efficient hardware and machine-learning architectures that can learn from a continuous stream of new data in real time, through opportunities for post-award collaboration between researchers supported by DARPA and NSF.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, and potentially transformative models for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduate education training. The NRT program seeks proposals that explore ways for graduate students in research-based master's and doctoral degree programs to develop the skills, knowledge, and competencies needed to pursue a range of STEM careers. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas, through the use of a comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. Proposals are requested in any interdisciplinary or convergent research theme of national priority, with special emphasis on the research areas in 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). 

A well-prepared, innovative science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce is crucial to the Nation's prosperity and security. Future generations of STEM professionals are a key sector of this workforce, especially in the critical scientific areas described in the Big Ideas for Future NSF Investments. To accelerate progress in these areas, the next generation of STEM professionals will need to master new knowledge and skills, collaborate across disciplines, and shape the future of the human-technology interface in the workplace. As a result, NSF recognizes the need to support development of and research on effective educational approaches that can position the future STEM workforce to make bold advances in these Big Ideas.

Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (hereinafter referred to as RED) is designed to build upon previous efforts in engineering education research. Specifically, previous and ongoing evaluations of the NSF Engineering Education and Centers Division program and its predecessors, as well as those related programs in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, have shown that prior investments have significantly improved the first year of engineering students' experiences, incorporating engineering material, active learning approaches, design instruction, and a broad introduction to professional skills and a sense of professional practice - giving students an idea of what it means to become an engineer. Similarly, the senior year has seen notable change through capstone design experiences, which ask students to synthesize the technical knowledge, skills, and abilities they have gained with professional capacities, using reflective judgment to make decisions and communicate these effectively. However, this ideal of the senior year has not yet been fully realized, because many of the competencies required in capstone design, or required of professional engineers, are only partially introduced in the first year and not carried forward with significant emphasis through the sophomore and junior years.

Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (hereinafter referred to as RED) is designed to build upon previous efforts in engineering education research. Specifically, previous and ongoing evaluations of the NSF Engineering Education and Centers Division program and its predecessors, as well as those related programs in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, have shown that prior investments have significantly improved the first year of engineering students' experiences, incorporating engineering material, active learning approaches, design instruction, and a broad introduction to professional skills and a sense of professional practice - giving students an idea of what it means to become an engineer. Similarly, the senior year has seen notable change through capstone design experiences, which ask students to synthesize the technical knowledge, skills, and abilities they have gained with professional capacities, using reflective judgment to make decisions and communicate these effectively. However, this ideal of the senior year has not yet been fully realized, because many of the competencies required in capstone design, or required of professional engineers, are only partially introduced in the first year and not carried forward with significant emphasis through the sophomore and junior years.

Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-1 (RII Track-1) awards provide up to $20 million total over five years to support research-driven improvements to jurisdictions' physical and cyber infrastructure and human capital development in topical areas selected by the jurisdiction's EPSCoR steering committee as having the best potential to improve future R&D competitiveness. The project's research activities must align with the specific research priorities identified in the submitting jurisdiction's approved Science and Technology (S&T) Plan. Refer to Sections II and V.A.4.1 below for more information on alignment of the research activities of the project with the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) research priorities of the S&T Plan.