NSF Grants

Supplemental Funding Requests to Support Super Intelligence (SI) Innovation in the Presidential SI Challenge is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF Directorates for EDU and TIP). Provides supplemental support for active NSF awardees to develop hands-on and experiential learning edtech opportunities, tools, and systems that foster student proficiency in advanced technologies across middle and high schools.

Plasma Physics is sponsored by NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation. This program supports foundational research in plasma physics, including studies of magnetized plasmas, high-energy-density plasmas, low-temperature plasmas, strongly coupled plasmas, non-neutral plasmas, and intense field-matter interactions. It encourages proposals that advance both theoretical and experimental understanding of plasma phenomena relevant to fusion science.

MPS Physics Research Programs (MPS Physics) is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS). This program supports foundational research in physics, including Plasma Physics and Advanced Physics Instrumentation. Research in plasma physics can encompass topics relevant to fusion energy, and the Advanced Physics Instrumentation component directly supports the acquisition, development, and implementation of advanced instrumentation needed for NSF MPS physics research programs.

National Science Foundation Fostering Interdisciplinary Networks to Develop Emergent and Responsive Solutions Foundry (NSF FINDERS FOUNDRY) is sponsored by NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation. Supports interdisciplinary partnerships among educators, technologists, and researchers to co-design and scale evidence-based, technology-driven solutions, particularly those involving AI, to strengthen K–12 learning and build a skilled workforce.

Joint National Science Foundation and United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture Funding Opportunity: Supporting Foundational Research in Robotics (FRR) is sponsored by NSF and USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). This is a joint NSF-USDA collaboration to advance foundational research in agricultural robotics, inviting proposals for pioneering robots with transformative potential in agricultural contexts.

TechAccess: AI-Ready America is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA), and U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). This national initiative aims to accelerate AI readiness and adoption across the U.S. by expanding access to AI knowledge, tools, and training for individuals, communities, and businesses, especially small and emerging enterprises. It focuses on strengthening coordination, leveraging partnerships, and scaling effective approaches. The program supports State/Territory Coordination Hubs to drive AI readiness.

The NeurIPS 2026 Smart Buildings Competition, hosted on Kaggle, asks entrants to train machine-learning or reinforcement-learning HVAC control policies on simulated buildings. The policies are then tested on unseen buildings that differ in size, layout, weather, materials and HVAC systems. HVAC accounts for 40 to 60 percent of building energy use, so the goal is policies that transfer across buildings with minimal setup. The organisers are the University of Washington, the NSF AI Institute in Dynamic Systems, Harvard, Columbia and Kajima Corporation. The $40,000 prize pool includes a $25,000 leaderboard pool, with first place at $5,750 and fourth to eighth place at $2,500 each. A $15,000 paper track runs through OpenReview: round-one papers are due 13 November 2026 and earn $250 to $1,000, and final papers are due 15 January 2027 and earn $500 to $3,000. The NeurIPS workshop is on 13 December 2026, and winners may test their policies on three real buildings. Solutions are licensed under CC-BY 4.0. The competition pages give conflicting entry deadlines of 3 December 2026 and 3 January 2027, so applicants should check the Kaggle page.

Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) is sponsored by NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC). This program supports the development and integration of advanced cybersecurity solutions to improve scientific cyberinfrastructure's security, resilience, and usability, enabling secure and reproducible data-driven discoveries. It includes areas like usable and collaborative security for science, reference scientific security datasets, transition to cyberinfrastructure resilience, and integrity, provenance, and authenticity for AI-ready data.

Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The CICI program aims to advance scientific discovery and innovation by enhancing the security and privacy of cyberinfrastructure. It supports efforts to develop, deploy, and integrate robust cybersecurity solutions—such as usable and collaborative security, secure data computation, and workflow protection—that benefit broader research and data-driven communities.

Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE): Directorate for STEM Education (EDU) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This initiative supports novel, creative, and transformative approaches to generating and using new knowledge about STEM teaching and learning to improve STEM education for undergraduate students. It encourages projects that bring recent advances in STEM knowledge into undergraduate education, adapt evidence-based practices, and lay groundwork for institutional improvement.

Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (CyberTraining) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This program aims to prepare, nurture, and grow the national scientific research workforce for creating, utilizing, and supporting advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) to enable and transform fundamental science and engineering research and education. It calls for innovative, scalable training, education, and curriculum/instructional materials to address emerging needs and bottlenecks in the S&E research workforce development.

Computer and Information Science and Engineering : Future Computing Research (Future CoRe) is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (NSF CISE). Supports foundational research and education projects across core computer science domains, including algorithmic foundations, communications, computer systems, cyber-physical systems, emerging technologies, human-centered computing, and software/hardware foundations.

Grants for Research on Future Computing Research (Future CoRe) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This program from the National Science Foundation supports research in future computing. While specific details on cyberinfrastructure or HPC testbeds are not fully elaborated in the summary, it aligns with foundational computing research that often underpins such infrastructure.

The restructured CPS program is one of the better-fitting NSF homes for embodied AI work that falls between pure machine learning and pure robotics, and the current solicitation makes that explicit in a way earlier CPS cycles did not. The named research emphases now include neuro-symbolic and embodied AI approaches, AI-enabled autonomy, safe learning and adaptive systems, and formal methods for verification and assurance of cyber-physical systems including those that integrate AI - language that directly invites proposals on provable safety guarantees for learning-enabled controllers, a topic that lost its dedicated NSF home when the Safe Learning-Enabled Systems solicitation (NSF 23-562) was archived after its January 2024 deadline. CPS is the natural landing place for that community. The program runs two tracks and requires proposers to signal which one in the proposal title: CPS Foundational Research (CPS-FR) for theoretical and foundational advances integrating computation with physical processes, and CPS Community-Inspired Research (CPS-CIR) for use-inspired work co-developed with communities to produce translational innovations and deployed systems. Budget structure changed meaningfully and applicants working from older guidance will get it wrong: the Small and Medium project classes have been consolidated into a single class capped at $1,000,000 over up to 4 years, with typical awards running $150,000 to $250,000 per year and an explicit discouragement against exceeding $300,000 in any single year. That annual ceiling is the real constraint - it rules out compute-heavy proposals that front-load GPU costs and favors sustained multi-year theoretical and experimental programs. Scheduling is forgiving: there are no hard deadlines, only target dates, set at the first Thursday in February annually (following the September 11, 2025 and February 5, 2026 dates), which means proposals can be submitted off-cycle at the cost of slower review batching. The program also covers IoT platforms, hardware-software co-design and quantum algorithms for high-dimensional state spaces. Program contact is cise-cps@nsf.gov.

Small Grants for Research (SGR) - Tribal Colleges and Universities Program (TCUP) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This strand supports STEM or STEM Education faculty members at TCUP-eligible institutions to initiate or pursue research projects or programs that may include undergraduate or graduate student engagement. Awards are intended to help further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improve research and teaching at their home institution, and create and study new models and innovations in STEM teaching and learning. Game-based learning could be considered an innovative model.

AI for Privacy, Safety, and Security Academic Research Awards is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This program supports research and networks to improve oversight, evaluation, and accountability in AI governance, prioritizing public interest, equity, and transparency in high-impact sectors. It includes research on research security to safeguard the U.

EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: EPSCoR Collaborations for Optimizing Research Ecosystems (E-CORE) is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). This program supports the NSF mission by promoting nationwide scientific progress and fostering partnerships among academic institutions, government, industry, and non-profits. It aims to drive long-term improvements in research infrastructure, enhance R&D capacity, and boost the research competitiveness of eligible EPSCoR jurisdictions. E-CORE aids in building significant and sustainable research capacity and research infrastructure for targeted areas of focus within a jurisdiction's research ecosystems.

Collaborative Research: Randomized Algorithms For Dynamic and Hierarchical Bayesian Inverse Problems is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This project aims to develop efficient randomized methods for two classes of inverse problems: dynamic inverse problems in which reconstructions have to be carried out at multiple time instances, and hierarchical Bayesian inverse problems, in which one has to jointly reconstruct unknowns and estimate hyperparameters. The research is relevant to uncertainty quantification in imaging and other fields.

Community Infrastructure for Research in Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CIRC) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). The CIRC program funds the creation and enhancement of world-class research infrastructure in computer and information science and engineering (CISE) to support diverse communities of CISE researchers. This includes developing user services, community engagement, and management infrastructure. The program supports four classes of awards: Planning Community Infrastructure, Exploratory Development, Medium Community Infrastructure, and Grand Community Infrastructure.

SOCIOLOGY PROGRAM - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Awards (Soc-DDRI) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This program supports theoretically grounded empirical investigations to advance understanding of fundamental social processes. Topics can include, but will not be limited to, organizations and organizational behavior, health and medicine, crime and deviance, inequality and stratification, population dynamics, social movements, social groups, labor force participation, stratification and mobility, family, social networks, socialization, gender, race, ethnicity, and the sociology of science and technology.

Grants for the Promotion of Start-up Projects for Small Businesses in Andalusia is a grant from the Andalusian Agency for Business Transformation and Economic Development (TRADE) that funds initial investment projects for newly created small businesses and microenterprises in Andalusia, Spain. Projects must exceed €30,000 in eligible investment linked to the creation of a new operational establishment. Aid begins at 55% of the eligible budget, with increases possible based on project characteristics. Funded under the Andalusia ERDF Programme 2021–2027 and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund, the program runs from July 10, 2024 through December 30, 2027. Applications are processed on a first-come, first-served basis until available funds are exhausted — no competitive ranking. This is one of three distinct TRADE funding lines targeting business creation and SME growth.

NSF 25-545 STEM K-12 is a new $30 million program supporting innovative, multidisciplinary research and development that builds theory and informs education practice in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, with a specific emphasis on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. The program supports fundamental, applied, and translational research that enhances STEM teaching and learning across formal and informal K-12 settings, including how AI and other emerging technologies can be effectively leveraged to study and enhance STEM teaching and learning. Released in September 2025 as part of the coordinated federal response to Executive Order 14277 on advancing AI education for American youth, the program accepts proposals on a rolling basis with no fixed deadline. Strong fit for education researchers, learning scientists, AI/HCI researchers, and PreK-12 education developers exploring AI tutoring, intelligent tutoring systems, AI-augmented assessments, AI literacy curricula, and AI for STEM teacher preparation.

RISE: RESEARCH ECOSYSTEM INTEGRATION AND SIOUXLAND PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Integrative Activities. This program supports research proposals specific to 'Growing Research Access for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity' with the goal to enhance the competitiveness of the Nation's research through activities that build capacity for science and engineering and develop …

MPS Physics Research Programs is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS). This funding opportunity supports multiple research programs at the frontiers of discovery in physics, including Elementary Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology - Theory, and Elementary Particle Physics - Experiment, which would encompass research on the Higgs field.