NSF's E-CORE Hands EPSCoR States Up to $10 Million to Build the Research Machine — Not the Research. The July 21 Deadline Rewards a Very Specific Proposal.

Most NSF competitions fund a research question. E-CORE funds the thing that makes research questions fundable in the first place. That distinction is the entire strategy for anyone considering NSF's EPSCoR Collaborations for Optimizing Research Ecosystems (E-CORE) program, whose FY2026 full-proposal deadline is Tuesday, July 21, 2026 (the third Tuesday in July, and annually thereafter). NSF plans to make up to 15 new awards from an annual budget of roughly $37.5 million, with each award providing up to $10 million over an initial four-year period and an optional renewal of up to $8 million for a second four years — a potential eight-year, $18 million commitment to a single jurisdiction's research infrastructure.

If you have written NSF proposals before, your instinct will be to describe a scientific problem and a plan to solve it. That instinct is wrong here, and following it produces a proposal that reviewers will politely decline. This is the deep dive on what E-CORE actually funds, which jurisdictions and institutions can compete, and how to write toward a rubric that most NSF applicants have never encountered.

What "Building the Ecosystem" Means

The Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) exists because federal research dollars concentrate. A large share of NSF, NIH, and DOE funding historically flows to the same set of research-intensive states and institutions, and EPSCoR is the structural correction — a mandate to build durable research capacity in jurisdictions that receive a smaller share of federal R&D. E-CORE is the newest expression of that mandate, and its premise is that capacity is not the same as any single grant. It is the machinery around the grants.

Concretely, E-CORE funds the development and long-term sustainability of interconnected research infrastructure cores: research administration and grants management, shared facilities and cyberinfrastructure, STEM education pathways from K-12 through higher education, early-career investigator development, broadening participation, workforce development, external partnerships and community engagement, technology transfer, and economic development tied to research. The through-line is that none of these is a research project. They are the connective tissue that lets a jurisdiction's researchers compete for — and successfully manage — research funding they otherwise could not win.

This is what people mean when they call E-CORE a "build-the-ecosystem" grant. Its sibling program, E-RISE (EPSCoR Research Incubators for STEM Excellence), is the "build-the-engine" companion that funds thematic research capacity; E-CORE builds the surrounding institutional infrastructure that every research theme depends on. If your instinct is to propose a research thrust, you are describing an E-RISE proposal, not an E-CORE one.

Who Can Compete — Jurisdiction and Institution

Eligibility operates on two levels, and both matter.

At the jurisdiction level, only EPSCoR-eligible states, territories, and commonwealths qualify. As of this cycle those are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, the U.S. Virgin Islands, West Virginia, and Wyoming — 28 jurisdictions in all. Eligibility is determined by a rolling formula tied to a jurisdiction's share of NSF research funding, so if you are near the eligibility threshold, confirm current status before investing months in a proposal.

At the institution level, E-CORE is not a free-for-all. NSF restricts leadership: an organization may serve as the lead on only one RII Track-1 award, E-CORE submission, or E-CORE award at a time (with limited exceptions), and individual PIs and co-PIs face parallel restrictions on holding more than one leadership role across these programs. In practice this means the proposal is typically assembled at the level of a jurisdiction's EPSCoR office or its flagship research institution, coordinating across the state's universities rather than pitting them against each other. E-CORE is explicitly a multi-organizational collaboration — a proposal that reads as a single university's wish list, rather than a jurisdiction-wide strategy, misreads the program.

Why This Is a Different Proposal to Write

Because E-CORE funds infrastructure rather than discovery, the review criteria bend away from the familiar NSF intellectual-merit-and-broader-impacts framing and toward questions of strategy, sustainability, and systemic change. Reviewers are asking a different set of questions, and your proposal has to answer them directly:

1. What is the jurisdiction's diagnosed weakness? Strong E-CORE proposals open with an honest, data-driven assessment of where the research ecosystem is failing — proposal submission rates, indirect-cost recovery gaps, cyberinfrastructure deficits, a leaky STEM pipeline, an inability to retain early-career faculty. Reviewers fund a credible diagnosis, not a generic aspiration to "enhance research."

2. How do the cores interconnect? The word "interconnected" is load-bearing. NSF is not funding a pile of independent line items; it wants a system where, say, improved research administration feeds early-career support, which feeds broadening participation, which feeds workforce outcomes. Show the connective logic explicitly.

3. What survives after the money ends? Sustainability is not a closing paragraph — it is a scored dimension. E-CORE's entire theory is that it builds durable capacity, so a proposal that describes activities with no plan for institutionalizing them after year four (or year eight) is arguing against the program's premise. Name the state appropriations, institutional commitments, or partnership revenue that carries the cores forward.

4. Who is accountable, and how will you know it worked? Infrastructure investments are notoriously hard to evaluate. Propose concrete metrics — dollars of external funding won, proposal success rates, faculty retention, students moved through the pipeline — and a governance structure that owns them.

The Strategic Calculus for Eligible Jurisdictions

For an EPSCoR jurisdiction, E-CORE is one of the largest single non-research investments NSF will make in your research enterprise, and the eight-year horizon makes it genuinely transformative for institutions that use it well. But the coordination cost is real. Because only one lead per jurisdiction can hold an E-CORE award at a time, the internal politics of who leads and which institutions are at the table have to be settled before the proposal is written — and a July 21 deadline leaves no room to litigate that in June.

The jurisdictions that win are the ones that treated E-CORE as a statewide strategic-planning exercise months ago: convening the flagship and regional institutions, agreeing on a shared diagnosis, and designating a lead with the administrative capacity to manage a $10 million, multi-organizational award. If your jurisdiction is still debating who holds the pen, this cycle may be a build-the-coalition year with an eye toward the next one — because E-CORE recurs annually on the third Tuesday of July, which is itself a strategic gift: you can plan a full year ahead against a fixed date.

For jurisdictions ready now, the move is to write toward the rubric that E-CORE actually uses — diagnosis, interconnection, sustainability, accountability — rather than the intellectual-merit framing that wins ordinary NSF grants. E-CORE is not asking what you will discover. It is asking whether you can build the machine that lets your researchers keep discovering long after the award closes. Answer that question convincingly, and $10 million over four years is within reach.

Full program details are in solicitation NSF 25-523 at nsf.gov; the FY2026 full proposal is due July 21, 2026.