NSF Just Dissolved the Divisions Biologists Aimed At for Forty Years. BIO Core Is $280 Million, 250-300 Awards, and No Program to Target.

For four decades, the first strategic decision a biologist made about an NSF proposal had nothing to do with the science. It was: which program?

Ecology or Population and Community Ecology. Systematics or Evolutionary Processes. Cellular Dynamics and Function or Genetic Mechanisms. Behavioral Systems or Physiological Mechanisms. Getting that choice right meant your proposal landed in front of a panel that recognized your methods and your literature. Getting it wrong meant a technically sound proposal read by people who did not quite see the point — and every senior biologist has a story about a grant that failed on placement rather than merit.

That decision no longer exists. NSF 26-517, Core Research in Biological Sciences, released August 17, 2026, replaces NSF 24-543, NSF 24-546 and NSF 24-539 — the core program solicitations of the Divisions of Environmental Biology, Integrative Organismal Systems, and Molecular and Cellular Biosciences — with one directorate-wide opportunity. The three divisions are described in NSF's own language as former.

And the sorting is now NSF's job, not yours:

"Proposals submitted to the Directorate for Biological Sciences (NSF BIO) will be sorted centrally and assigned to appropriate review units."

NSF frames this as removing "the burden on the proposer to find the best program fit" and permitting "expedited handling for all proposals." That is a genuine kindness to early-career PIs and to anyone doing work that never fit a program line. It is also a substantial transfer of control, and biologists should understand exactly what they handed over.

What the money actually is

BIO Core anticipates $280 million across an estimated 250 to 300 awards, with proposals permitted to request up to five years. It is the largest single line in the twelve-solicitation package NSF released that day, exceeding MPS Mathematical Sciences at $200 million and MPS Physics at $180 million.

Divide it through and you get roughly $930,000 to $1.12 million per award. Spread over a five-year project, that lands somewhere around $190,000 to $225,000 per year — a graduate student or postdoc, partial summer salary, supplies, and fieldwork or sequencing for a defined question. Compared to the rest of this package, biology fared well; MPS Chemistry averages closer to $500,000 per award and MPS Astronomy near $715,000. Compared to the cost of running a modern molecular or field ecology lab, it funds a line of inquiry, not an operation.

The scope now spans everything the three former divisions covered: "foundational, curiosity-driven, use-inspired or interdisciplinary research across all areas of biology," explicitly including work previously supported by legacy programs. NSF reorganized that breadth under three inquiry areas rather than divisional lines:

• Foundations of Life — natural and synthetic molecules, cells and tissues, and the physiology of living things
• Living Systems — how species evolve, interact, and shape Earth's ecosystems
• Bioinnovation and Infrastructure — functional genomic complexity, and the tools, data and technologies biology runs on

Note what those three do. They are not the old divisions relabeled. Molecular and cellular work and organismal physiology now sit together under Foundations of Life; evolution and ecology consolidate under Living Systems; and the tool-building, data and infrastructure work that used to be scattered across all three divisions gets its own named home. A PI whose research is genuinely interdisciplinary — a molecular ecologist, a computational evolutionary biologist — no longer has to pick a division and then spend two pages arguing why the other division's reviewers should not have gotten it.

Everything else is unusually permissive

Read alongside the rest of the August package, BIO Core is the most open door NSF opened.

Proposals are accepted anytime. No submission deadline, matching the rolling structure across the reset. Directorate Head Theresa Good noted that "most of BIO's funding opportunities have no deadlines," positioning this as continuity rather than rupture for biology specifically.

There are no PI limits. This is the detail that distinguishes BIO from the divisions where NSF clamped down hardest. MPS Chemistry caps each individual at two proposals per year counting PI, co-PI and senior/key personnel roles, returning excess submissions without review. MPS Materials caps at one per fiscal year. BIO Core imposes no such quota — you may submit as often as you can write.

Preliminary proposals are not required. DEB's preliminary proposal stage was, for years, one of the most consequential filters in American biology — a two-stage gauntlet that shaped how ecologists and evolutionary biologists planned multi-year work. It is gone.

Eligibility is broad: institutions of higher education including two-year and community colleges, non-profit non-academic organizations, and federally recognized Tribal Nations.

Safe and Harassment-Free Fieldwork Plans move to the back end. In a change that matters practically to every field biologist, NSF states that "a copy of the SAHF Plan will be requested only if a proposal is recommended for an award." The plan is still required; it is no longer compliance work you complete for a proposal that has a one-in-five chance of funding. For a department submitting fifteen field-based proposals a year, that is real administrative time returned.

The part that cuts both ways

Central sorting solves a real problem and creates a different one.

Under the old system, program targeting was a lever. A skilled PI used it deliberately — framing a question toward the panel most likely to value it, sometimes rewriting the same core science twice for two different audiences. That lever is now held by NSF. Your proposal is assigned to a review unit by staff reading your submission, not by you selecting a program code.

For work with an obvious home, this changes little. For work at a boundary — and biology's most interesting work is disproportionately at boundaries — the assignment decision is now made by someone who has your document and not your reasoning. The practical consequence is that your framing has to do the work your program selection used to do. The title, the abstract, and the first page are no longer just persuasion; they are routing instructions. If a proposal on microbiome-mediated plant stress response is written to read as molecular biology, it will be sorted as molecular biology, and the ecologists who would have championed it will never see it.

The second consequence is on timing. Rolling submission with centralized triage means the queue, not the calendar, determines when you are reviewed. NSF gains substantial discretion over portfolio balance across the year. That is the explicit design goal, and it is defensible. It also means the informal intelligence that used to circulate before a deadline — which program has money left, which panel is meeting when — becomes harder to come by and more valuable when you have it.

What to do in the next four weeks

Attend the September 16, 2026 BIO Virtual Office Webinar. Good pointed directly to it for the operational detail the solicitation and the August newsletter do not yet cover: how sorting will work in practice, how transition is being handled for proposals already in the system, and what target dates — if any — govern review cycles. That last question is the one that determines whether "accepted anytime" means "reviewed promptly" or "reviewed eventually," and it is not answered in the public documents.

Rewrite your first page as a routing document. Assume a staff member with broad biology training and no knowledge of your subfield's internal debates is deciding which panel reads your work. Name the inquiry area your project belongs to. Use the vocabulary of the review community you want, early and unambiguously.

Do not let the missing deadline push the writing. The strongest argument for hard deadlines was never fairness; it was that they forced work to happen. A proposal with no due date competes with teaching, a paper revision, and a student's defense — and loses. Set an internal submission date and treat it as external.

Reconsider projects that previously had no home. If you have shelved an idea because it fell between DEB and IOS, or because MCB reviewers would not see the organismal payoff, the structural reason for shelving it is gone. Central sorting plus three broad inquiry areas plus no preliminary proposal stage is, for genuinely interdisciplinary biology, the most favorable configuration NSF has offered in a long time.

The divisions biologists spent careers learning to navigate have been folded into a single door with $280 million behind it and no gatekeeper to route past — which means the advantage now belongs to whoever writes most clearly about where their work belongs. Figuring out which of NSF's twelve new solicitations actually fits a project, and what each one demands before you commit to writing, is precisely the sort of matching Granted exists to make fast.