Global Centers Program (NSF 24-556)

Global Centers Program (NSF 24-556) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). Supports international collaborations to address global challenges, including partnerships with the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).

NSF 24-556: Global Centers (GC) | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation Active funding opportunity This document is the current version. Important information for proposers and award recipients All proposals must be submitted in accordance with the requirements specified in the funding opportunity and in the Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) and its supplements .

All NSF grants and cooperative agreements are subject to the applicable set of NSF award terms and conditions . NSF has updated its research security policies for NSF funded projects.

NSF 24-556: Global Centers Use-Inspired Research Addressing Global Challenges through the Bioeconomy Download the solicitation (PDF, 1mb) Program Solicitation NSF 24-556 National Science Foundation Office of International Science and Engineering Office of Integrative Activities Directorate for Biological Sciences Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate for Engineering Directorate for Geosciences Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate for STEM Education Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships National Endowment for the Humanities Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Innovation Funding Agency Business Finland Research Council of Finland Japan Science and Technology Agency National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), Korea Republic of Korea - Ministry of Science and ICT United Kingdom Research and Innovation Full Proposal Deadline(s) (due by 5 p.

m. submitting organization's local time): Important Information And Revision Notes The Global Centers program is an NSF-led effort, implemented in partnership with other international funding agencies, to encourage and support large-scale collaborative use-inspired research to address global challenges through the bioeconomy and may include research from any combination of scientific disciplines supported by NSF.

The program will expect proposals for holistic, multidisciplinary projects that demonstrate integration of all international teams as well as the relevant scientific disciplines, including educational and social sciences necessary to achieve use-inspired outcomes.

The Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) welcomes submission of proposals to this funding opportunity that includes participation of the full spectrum of diverse talent in STEM (e.g., as PI, co-PI, senior/key personnel, postdoctoral scholars, graduate or undergraduate students, or trainees).

This includes historically under-represented or under-served populations, diverse institutions including Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs), and two-year colleges, as well as major research institutions. Proposals from EPSCoR jurisdictions are especially encouraged.

The specific subtopics within the solicitation are based on NSF's areas of strength and unique contributions to the Bioeconomy Executive Order and the Bold Goals For U.S. Biotechnology And Biomanufacturing . Priority bold goals for NSF include, but are not limited to, Leveraging Biodiversity Across the Tree of Life to Power the Bioeconomy, and Biofoundries (also called the Design-Build-Test-Learn process).

All proposals are expected to integrate two crosscutting themes into their plans for a center: public engagement and co-generation of research activities to strengthen the global science and technology enterprise, and workforce development and education, including clear statements regarding the impact on the communities that the research serves.

The use-inspired nature of the research, defined here as project outcomes leading to foreseeable benefits to society, requires early involvement and integration of stakeholder groups. Bioeconomy research resulting from funded proposals should produce actionable and/or policy-relevant outcomes that address one or more global challenges as identified by the scientific community.

Partner countries in 2024 Global Centers competition are Canada, Finland, Japan, Republic of Korea, United Kingdom and the United States.

Partner funding organizations, hereafter called funding partner agencies, are as follows: National Science Foundation (NSF) National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Research Council of Finland Innovation Funding Agency Business Finland Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), Korea Republic of Korea - Ministry of Science and ICT UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) NOTE: in this document, unless marked otherwise, reference to principal investigators (PIs) refers by default to U.S.-based researchers working in U.S. organizations (i.e., PIs of NSF proposals; see the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG), Chapter II Exhibit II-3.

A, for the NSF definition of a Principal Investigator). The proposal preparation instructions and eligibility criteria sections mostly apply to U.S. PIs and organizations. Please see Section II.

D. 2 for additional specific requirements from funding partner agencies for non-U.S.-based scientists, when applicable.

Also, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) here refers to all disciplinary fields relevant to NSF, including education and the social, behavioral and economic sciences which are important to the Global Centers Program and are expected to be integrated into the framework of the Global Centers proposals.

NSF will coordinate and manage the review of proposals in consultation with NEH and the participating international funding organizations listed in this solicitation, according to the respective arrangements with NSF (see Section II. D. 2 below).

Relevant information about proposals and reviews of proposals will be shared with the partner funding organizations as appropriate, according to the respective arrangements with NSF. Solicitation specific proposal preparation instructions and review criteria have changed. Design proposals will not be accepted.

Only Implementation proposals will be accepted. The number and identity of funding partner agencies have changed. In the framework of the Global Centers call, proposals that include off-campus or off-site research as part of their project must submit, as supplementary documentation, a Safe and Inclusive Fieldwork (SAIF) Plan.

For this solicitation, this document replaces the required plan associated with the certification in Chapter II. E. 9 of the PAPPG.

Instructions for inclusion of the SAIF Plan can be found in the additional proposal preparation instructions in this solicitation. Any proposal submitted in response to this solicitation should be submitted in accordance with the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) that is in effect for the relevant due date to which the proposal is being submitted.

The NSF PAPPG is regularly revised and it is the responsibility of the proposer to ensure that the proposal meets the requirements specified in this solicitation and the applicable version of the PAPPG. Submitting a proposal prior to a specified deadline does not negate this requirement.

Summary Of Program Requirements Use-Inspired Research Addressing Global Challenges through the Bioeconomy This solicitation describes an ambitious program to fund international, interdisciplinary collaborative research centers that will apply best practices of broadening participation and community engagement to develop use-inspired bioeconomy research to address one or more global challenges identified by the scientific community.

Here, the "used-inspired" nature of the research refers to project outcomes leading to foreseeable benefits to society. This program will prioritize research collaborations that foster team science and community-engaged research, use knowledge-to-action frameworks whose rationale, conceptualization, and research directions are driven by the potential use of the results as illustrated by Pasteur's Quadrant (see Stokes, Donald E.

(1997), "Pasteur's Quadrant - Basic Science and Technological Innovation," Brooking Institution Press, p. 196. ISBN 9780815781776).

Proposals should also indicate how research will be co-generated with communities and stakeholders identified in the proposal. The proposed research should maximize the benefits of international, interdisciplinary collaborations, and describe the roles and responsibilities of each national team in achieving the goals of the proposed Global Center.

Global Centers projects involving partnership between the U.S. and two or more partner countries are strongly encouraged. Global challenges must be addressed through international collaboration and researchers are encouraged to develop international teams to address research questions that can only be addressed through multilateral efforts.

The topic for the 2024 competition of the Global Centers program is Addressing Global Challenges through the Bioeconomy and may include research from any combination of research disciplines supported by NSF. The Bioeconomy is the share of the economy based on products, services, and processes derived from living systems.

Research investments to advance the bioeconomy serve to accelerate scientific discovery and to enable the harnessing, engineering, and rational modulation of biological systems to create goods and services that contribute to the agriculture, health, security, manufacturing, energy, and environmental sectors of the global economy; or that provide access to unique systems that help us understand the processes and issues that we can use biotechnology to solve.

Bioeconomy is built on the foundation of biotechnology and biomanufacturing, and in addition to biological science and engineering includes contributions from fields such as chemistry, materials science, geosciences, mathematics, data sciences, humanities, and the social sciences.

The world is facing many serious challenges, including, but not limited to, adapting to or mitigating the effect of climate change, developing clean energy approaches, identifying and advancing sustainable food systems, addressing water insecurity, exploring solutions to emerging infectious diseases, creating resource efficiency, sustaining biodiversity, addressing inequalities in access to biotechnologies, and developing a circular bioeconomy.

For example, bio-based materials offer heightened biodegradability and biosafety as compared to reusable plastic materials that shed micro-plastics during use and washing and affect water security and human health.

This Global Centers solicitation in Bioeconomy offers a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary teams of scientists, educators, and practitioners to use knowledge of the bioeconomy to co-develop and execute a research plan for an international center that will address a global challenge facing humanity.

The Global Centers program is meant to support multidisciplinary research that can only be achieved through international partnerships uniting complementary areas of expertise, and/or facilitating access to unique expertise or resources of the participating countries.

The proposal should explain how the center will maximize the benefits of international collaborations and describe the unique contributions and the roles and responsibilities of each national team in achieving the goals of the proposed Global Center. Successful proposals will describe how the center will tackle a global challenge that can only be addressed through the diversity of knowledge, skills, and resources united in this center.

Addressing global challenges requires international engagement and must go beyond production of data to demonstrate how co-generation and co-production of research with stakeholder groups can maximize the chances of research outcomes being taken up by target groups and applied to address the global challenge.

Because change requires human involvement, this process, described as the Knowledge to Action framework explicitly recognizes the need to involve appropriate scientific experts and practitioners who study and work with humans in implementing the human action aspect of the framework.

Examples of human action include (but are not limited to) studies in human and societal behavior, in policy, economics, psychology, anthropology, or education. Proposals are expected to describe a center that fully integrates human action elements with the knowledge generation portions of the center to produce a holistic, multi-disciplinary center that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The center should offer a plan of research in which disciplines are integrated and complement and support each other to produce world class research, train the next generation of workforce, and use best practices to ensure that participant communities and stakeholder groups are involved in all stages of the research process so that outcomes are aligned with their needs and readily adoptable.

Within the general theme of Bioeconomy, proposals submitted in the framework of this call must be centered on either or both of the two subtopics: Subtopic 1 : Leveraging Biodiversity Across the Tree of Life to Power the Bioeconomy; and Subtopic 2 : Biofoundries, using the Design-Build-Test-Learn process in biology.

All proposals must integrate both of the two crosscutting themes into the proposed work: Crosscutting Theme A : Public engagement and co-generation of research activities to strengthen the global science and technology enterprise; and Crosscutting Theme B : Workforce Development and Education. See Section II, Program Description for details.

Cognizant Program Officer(s): Please note that the following information is current at the time of publishing. See program website for any updates to the points of contact. Paul Raterron, telephone: (703) 292-8565, email: globalcenters@nsf.

gov B J. Middendorf, telephone: (703) 292-2630, email: globalcenters@nsf. gov Lance Manuel, telephone: (703) 292-4250, email: globalcenters@nsf.

gov Clifford Weil, BIO, telephone: (703) 292-4668, email: cweil@nsf. gov Sorin Draghici, CISE, telephone: (703) 292-2232, email: sdraghic@nsf. gov Elsa Gonzalez, EDU, telephone: (703) 292-4690, email: elgonzal@nsf.

gov Crystal Leach, ENG, telephone: (703) 292-2667, email: crleach@nsf. gov Lina C. Patino, GEO, telephone: (703) 292-5047, email: lpatino@nsf.

gov Yulia Gel, MPS, telephone: (703) 292-7888, email: ygel@nsf. gov Jeremy Koster, SBE, telephone: (703) 292-8740, email: jkoster@nsf. gov Michael Reksulak, TIP, telephone: (703) 292-8329, email: mreksula@nsf.

gov Applicable Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) Number(s): 47. 049 --- Mathematical and Physical Sciences 47. 070 --- Computer and Information Science and Engineering 47.

074 --- Biological Sciences 47. 075 --- Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences 47. 076 --- STEM Education 47.

079 --- Office of International Science and Engineering 47. 083 --- Office of Integrative Activities (OIA) 47. 084 --- NSF Technology, Innovation and Partnerships Anticipated Type of Award: Standard Grant or Continuing Grant Estimated Number of Awards: 5 to 7 Anticipated Funding Amount: $25,000,000 The estimated number of awards and anticipated funding level are subject to the availability of funds.

Who May Submit Proposals: Proposals may only be submitted by the following: Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) - Two- and four-year IHEs (including community colleges) accredited in, and having a campus located in the US, acting on behalf of their faculty members.

Special Instructions for International Branch Campuses of US IHEs: If the proposal includes funding to be provided to an international branch campus of a US institution of higher education (including through use of subawards and consultant arrangements), the proposer must explain the benefit(s) to the project of performance at the international branch campus, and justify why the project activities cannot be performed at the US campus.

Non-profit, non-academic organizations: Independent museums, observatories, research laboratories, professional societies and similar organizations located in the U.S. that are directly associated with educational or research activities. There are no restrictions or limits. Limit on Number of Proposals per Organization: There are no restrictions or limits.

Limit on Number of Proposals per PI or co-PI: An individual may be listed as a PI or a co-PI on no more than one proposal submitted in response to this solicitation. Proposals exceeding this limit will be returned without review in the reverse order received. Proposal Preparation and Submission Instructions A.

Proposal Preparation Instructions Letters of Intent: Not required Preliminary Proposal Submission: Not required Full Proposals submitted via Research. gov: NSF Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) guidelines apply. The complete text of the PAPPG is available electronically on the NSF website at: https://www.

nsf. gov/publications/pub_summ. jsp?

ods_key=pappg . Full Proposals submitted via Grants. gov: NSF Grants.

gov Application Guide: A Guide for the Preparation and Submission of NSF Applications via Grants. gov guidelines apply (Note: The NSF Grants. gov Application Guide is available on the Grants.

gov website and on the NSF website at: https://www. nsf. gov/publications/pub_summ.

jsp? ods_key=grantsgovguide ). Cost Sharing Requirements: Inclusion of voluntary committed cost sharing is prohibited.

Indirect Cost (F&A) Limitations: Other Budgetary Limitations: Full Proposal Deadline(s) (due by 5 p. m. submitting organization's local time): Proposal Review Information Criteria National Science Board approved criteria.

Additional merit review criteria apply. Please see the full text of this solicitation for further information. Award Administration Information Standard NSF award conditions apply.

Standard NSF reporting requirements apply. Recognizing the critical value of international partnerships to advance research that addresses global challenges, this competition will support cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, use-inspired research in the bioeconomy in collaboration with international partnerships to foster breakthroughs and encourage knowledge to action to address global challenges.

Awards will promote the creation of prominent, enduring, international centers of research excellence that advance knowledge, empower communities, and co-generate discovery and innovative solutions at the regional and/or global scale.

Successful proposals will be driven by a bold vision for high-impact, use-inspired research centers along with a clear strategy to leverage funding to integrate diverse perspectives from different disciplines, international partners, and stakeholder groups into the research. The "used-inspired" nature of the research refers to project outcomes leading to foreseeable benefits to society.

They are expected to demonstrate the potential to scale up and expand their research, while building a scientific and stakeholder community potentially able to carry out the work beyond the center funding period.

Awards will enable research at the leading edge of science and engineering by facilitating partnerships with others nationally and internationally, by educating and preparing a diverse, world-class research workforce, and by furthering international collaboration. The partnerships should also foster participation of the full spectrum of diverse talent in STEM in both research and education plans.

Awards should maximize the benefits of international, interdisciplinary collaborations and indicate how these multilateral teams are uniquely positioned to address these global challenges even beyond what bilateral partnerships could accomplish. Proposals should also describe the roles and responsibilities of each national team in uniquely contributing to the goals of the proposed Global Center.

Program Objectives are to: create physical or virtual international research centers that advance innovative, interdisciplinary, use-inspired research and education on the bioeconomy to address societal challenges through international collaboration and multi-stakeholder engagement; promote international collaboration for advantages of scope, scale, flexibility, expertise, facilities, and/or access to specific geographic locations, to enable advances that could not occur otherwise; expand opportunities for students and early career researchers to gain education and training in world class research while enhancing the participation of the full spectrum of diverse talent in STEM.

Where possible, provide opportunities for workforce training in bioeconomy that does not require advanced degrees but training of a competitive workforce; and integrate stakeholders and community members into the planning of the research so that centers reflect a co-designed and co-developed work plan that results in co-generation of results likely to be taken up by relevant user groups to solve urgent societal challenges at a regional or global scale to support the communities that they serve.

B. PROJECT CHARACTERISTICS The research centers should involve multiple constituencies and institutions. Proposers should be tackling scientific challenges that are larger in scale than can be accomplished by a single institution, a single discipline, or a single country.

A center may be focused on a geographic region but should explain how that science is regionally or globally transferable. Proposed centers may involve collaboration with other international research partners beyond the initial bilateral or multilateral collaboration with partner funding agencies.

Centers will support use-inspired research directed by an ambitious research agenda to address a societal challenge of regional or global importance related to the bioeconomy that requires international collaboration, multi-stakeholder engagement, and full integration of one or more social science disciplines that ensure results will be of value to constituents.

The proposed center must have a clearly defined research focus and demonstrate how international collaboration will produce innovative use-inspired outcomes in research and education. The research should be fundamental, and the proposal should indicate how recipient stakeholders were involved in co-generation of the research plan and how likely outcomes would be used by those groups.

Centers must explain how they will fully integrate broadening participation activities into the scientific plan, recognizing that such activities not only help diversify the research workforce, but fundamentally impact how the science is conducted and who is involved and included in the development of scientific ideas.

Proposed centers must provide meaningful international research experiences for students from the U.S. and the international partners. Centers must have clear research and educational plans with identified milestones, potential roadblocks, and ways to overcome them, as well as expected deliverables and outcomes with associated timelines within the funding period timeframe.

The proposal should describe the expected results that are associated with project milestones and projected growth of the center based on an explicit implementation strategy.

Teams proposing research to address societal challenges that disproportionately impact specific groups in the U.S. and/or abroad are strongly encouraged to engage those stakeholders as co-collaborators in designing their role research endeavor and as recipients impacted by the center's outcomes.

Each center should identify relevant stakeholders and clearly explain how it will engage them in a manner that will drive the basic science research priorities. Stakeholders may be local communities, government (local, state and/or federal) agencies, nonprofit organizations, private sector businesses, and other entities.

Centers may exhibit diverse forms of organization, collaboration, and operation suited to support their priorities, approaches, and practice. Centers must have plans in place for enabling research across disciplines and institutions and should identify and implement a structure that will enable interaction among the various institutions, stakeholders, and communities.

The center may be completely virtual, or it may have a physical central location, although the GC program will not fund the building of a new physical infrastructure. It is anticipated that over the lifespan of the center the research pursued and the activities it engages in may evolve. The proposal should explain how its leadership, approach, and structure can evolve to best serve all the participants and the evolving scientific focus.

However, during the funding period, any change of scope would have to be justified and agreed upon by the funding agencies. The proposed center should have a vision and strategy for potential growth, scaling up, and building a relevant community able to carry out the work beyond the funding period. The Global Centers program will only fund Center Implementation awards this competition, subject to availability of appropriated funds.

No Design awards will be funded in fiscal year 2024. Implementation proposals will include research Partnerships with Canada, Finland, Japan, Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom.

This track will support proposals to advance use-inspired research in the bioeconomy that involve U.S. teams supported by NSF, in collaboration with the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and with foreign teams supported by funding partner agencies based in the FY2024-round partner countries, (i.e., Canada, Finland, Japan, Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom).

Proposals must be aligned with topics identified by NSF and the international funding partners. NSF anticipates making awards of up to $5 million each, for up to 4 or 5 years with international funding agencies expected to support in parallel roughly comparable effort by their own researchers. Refer to Section II.

D. 2 for details on the specific documentation that needs to be submitted to the partner agencies to assess award eligibility. For the FY2024 competition, the funding partner agencies are NEH, NSERC, SSHRC, RCF, BF, JST, MSIT, NRF, and UKRI.

Proposals must include at least one institution in the U.S. partnering with at least one institution or researcher eligible to receive funding from one of the five partner countries (refer to Section II. D. 2) but may include as many as five of the partner countries.

Proposals may also involve partnership with stakeholders in other non-partner countries but researchers from those countries must secure their own sources of funding. The official partner countries and number of funding partner agencies involved in future Global Centers competitions may change. D.

SUPPORTED RESEARCH THEMES AND COLLABORATIONS WITH INTERNATIONAL FUNDING PARTNER AGENCIES Proposals are accepted in any field or combination of fields of science, engineering, or education research supported by NSF, or convergent fields that cut across NSF-supported disciplines (also known as transdisciplinary research; see the NSF definition of convergence ).

Proposals must focus on a clear research area within Bioeconomy, relating to either leveraging biodiversity across the tree of life to power the bioeconomy and/or research related to biofoundries (see Section "Synopsis of Program" and below). Proposals may include one or both of the Subtopics, but must include elements that fulfill both Crosscutting themes. D.

1 Supported Research Themes Within the general theme of Bioeconomy, the two identified subtopics, and the two crosscutting themes, proposals may address a wide range of research projects that may lead to novel directions, including but not limited to those mentioned in this solicitation.

These research topics should remain broad enough in scope to allow for potential intersections with the priorities and interests of partnering funding agencies, and to maximize the potential for mutual interests to emerge. Please see the " Additional Solicitation Specific Review Criteria " (Section VI. A) for further guidance.

D. 1. a Subtopic 1: Leveraging Biodiversity Across the Tree of Life to Power the Bioeconomy Unleashing the promise of the bioeconomy relies on using the diverse capabilities found in living organisms to produce new products and processes with the potential to diagnose and treat disease, develop resilient crops, create clean forms of energy, inspire novel materials and more.

For example, many of the antibiotics and anticancer drugs we use today were found by exploring the chemicals produced by different microbes and plants. Many enzymes found in laundry detergents came from organisms that live at high temperatures. We are discovering how to make strong glues and even stronger fibers by mimicking processes in barnacles and spiders.

We are identifying organisms capable of capturing greenhouse gases and leveraging the power of biotechnology to develop bio-based processes for fossil fuel replacements in the manufacture of textiles. These innovations and others like them have sprung out of knowledge of only a tiny fraction of the ways that life on Earth has evolved.

Imagine what more could be revealed from the estimated millions of species of plants, animals, fungi, and potentially one trillion species of microbes on the planet. Tapping into this huge reservoir of undiscovered and uncharacterized species will provide knowledge of new genes and how those genes create different physical and physiological traits, a connection known as genotype-to-phenotype.

Moreover, research on all manner of organisms and how they interact — from microbes to plants to animals — and application of comparative genomics to identify similarities and differences can be harnessed in novel biotechnologies and biomanufacturing processes.

Achieving the bold goals of characterizing diverse species and learning the functions of their genes will rely on new tools and methods of understanding gene function to accelerate the process, while accounting for a broad range of inherent uncertainties.

Storing and analyzing huge amounts of genome and phenotype data will require innovations in computing, including artificial intelligence (AI) and mathematical foundations behind these AI approaches. Using those data to create new products for the bioeconomy will require innovations in bioengineering and bio-design as well as sustained support for needed infrastructure.

Areas of particular interest include, but are not limited to, the following: Put biodiversity to use in new applications for the bioeconomy. Use biodiversity with the express purpose of finding ways it can advance bioeconomy research in reconstructing pathways, regulation, and scale-up. Create new and improved technologies to move genes from one organism to another.

Use outcomes of functional discovery to expand the number of organisms that can be used as hosts (chassis) in engineered biological systems. Combine innovations from chemistry and materials science with outcomes of sequencing and functional analyses to expand the repository of "parts" for so-called "plug-and-play" design-build capabilities that incorporate biotic-abiotic interfaces as control elements.

Leverage biodiversity to develop holistic approaches using clean technology to mitigate pathogens and diseases and provide more integrated solutions to promote greater biodiversity. Leverage learnings from biodiversity studies for bio-inspired design of new materials, devices, and products for the bioeconomy using novel mathematical and AI tools.

Tailoring of biomass to bio-refining pathways, developing catalytic, thermo-chemical, and biochemical conversion processes. Promote the use of natural products in the food, biotechnology, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industries. Research to enhance discovery of novel function from diverse organisms across the tree of life.

Accelerate development of computational and experimental tools to enhance comparative discovery of sequence and functional elements (e.g., regulatory networks, metabolic pathways, and traits) that define genotype-to-phenotype relationships. Connect genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics data gathering capabilities with new and existing capacity to accelerate the transformation of data into knowledge, as well as reduce time and costs.

Enable a robust ecosystem of secured data infrastructure for the bioeconomy. Collaborate to enhance capacity for data handling and analysis, including cyberinfrastructure and bioinformatics, to enable equitable, wide-spread access to data from biodiversity studies and to ensure reproducibility of the proposed research approaches.

Applicants should align their efforts in this area with existing open initiatives (e.g., Building the Prototype Open Knowledge Network (Proto-OKN) ) to ensure biological data (and biological parts) are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), and to ensure sustained support for the data infrastructure.

This alignment will also ensure that the proposed data infrastructure complies with current Data/AI ethics, standards, and guidelines. Moreover, it will support synthesis activities through substantial center-scale investments, enabling community-driven utilization and analysis of data, thereby catalyzing innovations in discovery across the tree of life.

Proposals should balance the need for open data with respect for intellectual property rights to maintain innovation incentives and appropriate data protection and security measures for sensitive data and should follow CARE principles as described by the Global Indigenous data alliance ( https://www. gida-global. org/ ) when applicable.

Proposals should address ethics of data infrastructure and management as pertains to bioeconomy and biodiversity, particularly relating to genomic data. Projects should sustain and enhance living and digitized collections to ensure they remain a resource for diverse downstream applications, and support synthesis activities that enable community-driven use and analysis of data.

Prepare for the bioeconomy's next digital leap in which data provides added value (e.g., as part of services or modeling tools. Produce open data that respects the ownership of data, based on which new products and services can be designed based on digital modeling. Develop digital platforms suitable for bioeconomy cooperation networks to improve efficiency.

Strengthen the connection to development programs and experiments in the digitalization of the circular economy. Build an operating method for linking data on carbon footprint and other sustainability aspects of food products and raw materials, which already have highly transparent monitoring. Need for digitalization of the bioeconomy at different levels.

Systematically integrate bioinformatics with other data types, including multi-modal and multi-resolution information sources, to improve modeling. and predictive capabilities under uncertainties to increase robustness of the developed digital solutions with respect to threats, missing/irregular data records and latent biases, and to increase productivity in the agriculture and other sectors.

Socio-Economic Impact Assessment, Indigenous Knowledge, Historical and Cultural Ecology. Social scientists and humanities scholars can conduct research into the bioeconomy.

For example, social scientists can conduct studies to assess the socio-economic impacts of leveraging biodiversity for the bioeconomy, and examine factors such as job creation, economic inequalities, and community well-being to support societal benefit of the research. Projects that collaborate with indigenous communities to document and understand traditional knowledge related