Young Faculty Award

The Department of Defense solicits ground-breaking single-investigator proposals from junior faculty for research and development in the areas of Physical Sciences, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine, Biology, Information and Social Sciences of interest to DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO), Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), and Information Innovation Office (I2O).

Amount: $300,000

Date due: January 19, 2012

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NSF Political Science Program

The NSF Political Science Program supports scientific research that advances knowledge and understanding of citizenship, government, and politics. Research proposals are expected to be theoretically motivated, conceptually precise, methodologically rigorous, and empirically oriented. Substantive areas include, but are not limited to, American government and politics, comparative government and politics, international relations, political behavior, political economy, and political institutions.

In recent years, program awards have supported research projects on bargaining processes; campaigns and elections, electoral choice, and electoral systems; citizen support in emerging and established democracies; democratization, political change, and regime transitions; domestic and international conflict; international political economy; party activism; political psychology and political tolerance. The Program also has supported research experiences for undergraduate students and infrastructural activities, including methodological innovations, in the discipline.

Amount: Varies

Date due: January 15, 2012

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Social Science Research Council seeks grant proposals

The Social Science Research Council has announced the launch of a major new project and grants program entitled "New Directions in the Study of Prayer." Supported with funding from the John Templeton Foundation and developed in conjunction with the SSRC's program on Religion and the Public Sphere, the project aims to generate innovative research on practices of prayer and to foster the development of an interdisciplinary network of scholars engaged in the study of prayer.

The project invites proposals from scholars in all disciplines for studies that will enhance knowledge of the social, cultural, psychological, and cognitive dimensions of prayer, and of its origins, variations, and correlations in human life. Of special interest are proposals for research that will shed new light on the relationships between the practice of prayer and virtue, human flourishing, altruism, and creativity, or that examine the cognitive aspects of prayer, the embeddedness of prayer in religious and nonreligious institutions, the social dimensions of prayer, and cultural variations in prayer across societies and religious traditions.

Proposals will be especially encouraged from, but will not be restricted to, the disciplines of anthropology, cognitive science, history, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, and sociology. New Directions in the Study of Prayer will welcome proposals for projects that study any religious tradition(s) and milieu(s), and that focus on populations in any geographical region(s) of the world. Proposals must include a clearly articulated program of empirical research. Proposals may include a focus on theology but should not be restricted to theological inquiry. Historical topics are of interest only insofar as they specifically relate to practices and understandings of prayer in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Approximately twenty to twenty-five grants, ranging from $50,000 to $200,000, each with a duration of two years, will be awarded.

Amount: $50,000 - $200,000

Date due: December 1, 2011

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Debate Team Grants for Departments and Schools in Universities

The Open Society Foundation (OSF) will provide up to three years of funding to colleges, universities, and other educational institutions to integrate debate across disciplines. The International Debate Education Association will implement the programs and help OSF identify and provide support to grantees.

Grants will be available for institutions that have either very small debate programs or none at all. Grants also will be made to institutions seeking to promote public debates within the broader communities that they serve and to increase the capacity of young people from marginalized communities to engage in debates concerning controversial issues affecting their lives.

Amount: $25,000

Date due: Rolling

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Partnerships for International Research (PIRE)

Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) is an NSF-wide program that supports international activities across all NSF supported disciplines. The primary goal of PIRE is to support high quality projects in which advances in research and education could not occur without international collaboration. PIRE seeks to catalyze a higher level of international engagement in the U.S. science and engineering community. International partnerships are essential to addressing critical science and engineering problems. In the global context, U.S. researchers and educators must be able to operate effectively in teams with partners from different nations and cultural backgrounds. PIRE promotes excellence in science and engineering through international collaboration and facilitates development of a diverse, globally-engaged, U.S. science and engineering workforce. This PIRE competition will focus exclusively on the NSF-wide investment area of Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES). The SEES effort focuses on interdisciplinary topics that will advance sustainability science, engineering and education as an integrative approach to the challenges of adapting to environmental, social and cultural changes associated with growth and development of human populations, and attaining a sustainable energy future.

Amount: $4 million across 5 years

Date due: Preliminary proposals due October 19, 2011

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Research on Children in Military Families: The Impact of Parental Military Deployment and Reintegration

The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to encourage developmental and exploratory studies on the impact of parental military deployment, combat-related stress, and reintegration with the family on child social and affective development as well as family functioning. Intervention studies targeting the particular concerns of early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence are also encouraged, as are the development and testing of measures to assess family functioning and child development outcomes.

Amount: $275,000

Date due: May 7, 2011

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Program for North American Mobility in Higher Education

The Program for North American Mobility is designed to assist colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico in giving students a North American perspective on education and training in a wide range of subject areas. The ultimate intent of the program is to assist with the building of a North American community. The North American Program fosters student exchange within the context of multilateral curricular development. Students benefit from having an added "North American" curriculum perspective and cultural dimension to their studies through a combination of trilateral curricular innovation and study abroad. The program will support collaborative efforts in the form of consortial partnerships consisting of either 1) at least two academic institutions from each country, funded for a period of four years, or 2) a partnership consisting of one academic institution from each country for a period of three years.

Amount: $180,000

Date due: May 17, 2011

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Digging into Data

The creation of vast quantities of Internet-accessible digital data and the development of techniques for large-scale data analysis have led to remarkable new discoveries in genetics, astronomy, and other fields, and—importantly—connections between different academic disciplines. The Digging into Data Challenge seeks to discover how these new research techniques might also be applied to questions in the humanities and social sciences. New techniques of large-scale data analysis allow researchers to discover relationships, detect discrepancies, and perform computations on so-called “big data” sets that are so large that they can be processed only by using computing resources and computational methods that were developed and made economically affordable within the past few years. This “data deluge” has arisen not just from the capture and storage of data on everyday transactions such as Internet searches, consumer purchases, cell phone records, “smart” metering systems and sensors, but also from the digitization of all types of media, with books, newspapers, journals, films, artworks, and sound recordings being digitized on a massive scale. It is possible to apply data linkage and analysis techniques to large and diverse data collections, including survey data, economic data, digitized newspapers, books, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources. How might these techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world? To encourage innovative approaches to this question, eight international research organizations are organizing a joint grant competition to focus the attention of the social sciences, humanities, library, archival, and information sciences communities on large-scale data analysis and its potential applications. The four goals of the initiative are * to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis that focus on applications for the humanities and social sciences; * to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, library, archive, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis; * to promote international collaboration among both researchers and funders; and * to ensure efficient access to and sharing of the materials for research by working with data repositories that hold large digital collections.

Amount: $175,000

Date due: June 16, 2011

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AERA Research Grants Program

AERA Research Grants Program provides small grants and training for researchers who conduct studies of education policy and practice using quantitative methods, including the analysis of data from the large-scale data sets sponsored by National Center for Education Statistics and NSF.

Research Grants are available for faculty at institutions of higher education, postdoctoral researchers, and other doctoral-level scholars. Applications are encouraged from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to education, sociology, economics, psychology, demography, statistics, and psychometrics.

Amount: $35,000

Date due: March 9, 2011

For more information, click here.

Financial Education grants (broad scope)

The National Endowment for Financial Education, a nonprofit, national foundation wholly dedicated to improving the financial well-being of all Americans, has announced guidelines for its 2011 grant program.

The NEFE grants program seeks to fund innovative research and research-based development projects that can make a profound contribution to the field of financial literacy. Inquiries are encouraged from disciplines in fields as diverse as behavior, economics, neuroscience, sociology, psychology, marketing, finance, education, change theory, decision sciences, and others.

Of particular interest are pro-active research projects whose findings may cultivate critical thinking in the financial literacy community. Also of interest are development projects that put research recommendations into action. Project outcomes must be capable of achieving traction and measurable impact with audiences such as financial education intermediaries, researchers, practitioners, decision makers, and others who can achieve effective outreach to a target population with an unmet financial literacy need or to the general public.

Amount: Varies

Date due: June 7, 2011

For more information, click here.

Economics of Retirement

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages research on the economic and health-related factors that influence older persons’ choices on labor force participation as they near typical retirement age and throughout the later stages of life. The interaction of health, work, family status, and economic wellbeing is enormously complex, and the direction of causal effects among those factors is often unclear. Because of those complexities, the FOA especially encourages innovative approaches to (1) modeling the dynamic processes underlying labor force decisions over the life-cycle, and (2) enabling valid causal inference regarding the effects of economic and health factors on work decisions as well as the effects of work on health status. The FOA calls for analysis of secondary datasets, development of new datasets, observational and experimental analysis, cross-national comparisons; and quasi-experiments enabled by changes in public policy. Research that identifies disparities between population segments or emphasizes at-risk groups is encouraged.

Date due: May 16, 2011 (Letter of intent); June 16, 2011 (Application)

Amount: $50,000

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Social Science Research coordination with Sea Grants

The California, University of Southern California, Oregon, and Washington Sea Grant programs are jointly interested in coordinated research efforts that bring together researchers from across the region to address specific social science issues of regional priority. Encompassing the shorelines, estuaries and offshore ocean environments from Washington to California, West Coast marine and coastal ecosystems are diverse and rapidly changing. Expanding pressures from population growth, changing land use and large-scale environmental shifts are affecting the natural resources and biogeochemical processes that sustain coastal regions and the communities, businesses and people that rely upon them.

The four West Coast programs are interested in regional proposals that address social science questions related to national Sea Grant goals for healthy coastal ecosystems, sustainable coastal development, safe sustainable seafood supply and hazard resilient coastal communities. Alignment is encouraged with state, regional and national research priorities (see .pdf for links). The range of potential marine and coastal research topics includes, but is not limited to:

• Coastal and marine spatial planning and its application to emerging issues like marine renewable energy
• Use and valuation of coastal and marine resources, including fisheries, and implications for
  management
• Relationships among social, economic and ecological sustainability and resilience of coastal regions
• Patterns, processes and social institutions that underlie changing coastal demographics and economies
• Human roles and responses to regional climate and environmental changes such as severe storms, coastal inundation, ocean acidification, sea level rise and shifting circulation and marine population distributions
• Community and stakeholder engagement, visioning, social learning and other methods to support coastal sustainability and environmental protection

Amount: Varies

Date due: February 22, 2011 (Letter of Intent); May 15, 2011 (Full proposal)

For more information, click here.

Landmarks of American History and Culture (K-12 educators)

The Landmarks of American History and Culture program supports series of one-week residence-based workshops for a national audience of K-12 educators. NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops use historic sites to address central themes and issues in American history, government, literature, art, music, and other related subjects in the humanities. The goals of the workshops are to increase knowledge and appreciation of subjects, ideas, and places significant to American history and culture through humanities reading and site study; build a community of inquiry and provide models of civility and of excellent scholarship and teaching; provide teachers with expertise in the use and interpretation of historical sites and of material and archival resources; and encourage historical and cultural sites to develop greater capacity and scale for professional development programs. NEH Landmarks Workshops are held at or near sites important to American history and culture (e.g., presidential residences or libraries; colonial-era settlements; major battlefields; historic districts; parks and preserves; sites of key economic, social, political, and constitutional developments; and places associated with major writers, artists, and musicians). Applicants should make a compelling case for the historical significance of the site(s), the material resources available for use, and the ways in which the site(s) will enhance the workshop. NEH Landmarks Workshops are academically rigorous and focus on key primary sources, documents, and scholarly works relevant to major themes of American history and culture. Leading scholars should serve as lecturers or seminar leaders. Workshops should also provide the opportunity to work with primary documents and develop classroom resources or a research project. Institutions or organizations that may host workshops include community colleges, universities, four-year colleges, learned societies, libraries or other repositories, centers for advanced study, cultural organizations, and professional associations. NEH expects host institutions to provide facilities conducive to scholarly research, discussion, and interaction. Host institutions should arrange suitable housing for participants, which participants pay for from the stipends provided to them as part of the Landmarks workshop grant.

Amount: $180,000

Date due: March 1, 2011

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NEH Summer Seminars & Institutes

The NEH Summer Seminars & Institutes grants support faculty development programs in the humanities for school teachers and for college and university teachers. NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes may be as short as two weeks or as long as five weeks. The duration of a program should allow for a rigorous treatment of its topic. NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes extend and deepen knowledge and understanding of the humanities by focusing on significant topics, texts, and issues; contribute to the intellectual vitality and professional development of participants; build a community of inquiry and provide models of civility and excellent scholarship and teaching; and promote effective links between teaching and research in the humanities. An NEH Summer Seminar or Institute may be hosted by a college, university, school system, learned society, center for advanced study, library or other repository, or a cultural or professional organization. The host site must be appropriate for the project, providing facilities for scholarship and collegial interaction. These programs are designed for a national audience of teachers.

Amount: $200,000

Date due: March 1, 2011

For more information, click here.