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The Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program is ONR's flagship early-career award, identifying scientists and engineers in academia and non-profit research institutions who show exceptional promise for creative basic and applied research aligned with naval science and technology priorities. The FY2027 competition runs under Notice of Funding Opportunity N0001426SF004.
For AI researchers the programme is one of the more accessible routes into Navy funding: ONR's science and technology portfolio places sustained emphasis on autonomy, machine learning, autonomous and unmanned maritime and aerial systems, human-machine teaming, and AI for command and control and decision support, and YIP proposals are written to a programme officer's research interests rather than to a prescriptive topic list.
That structure rewards applicants who make contact with the relevant ONR programme officer before writing, since the award is as much about alignment with a specific officer's portfolio as about raw technical merit. Unlike many federal early-career awards, YIP carries no requirement for a prior relationship with the agency and explicitly targets investigators in their first or second faculty appointment.
Total funding available for the FY2027 cycle is 18,750,000 dollars across up to 25 awards, making this one of the larger early-career cohorts in defence basic research. Full proposals are due 30 October 2026, which makes this a near-term rather than a planning-horizon opportunity.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: Applicants must hold a PhD or equivalent degree awarded on or after 1 January 2019, and must be in their first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent academic appointment. Faculty at U.S. institutions of higher education are eligible, and individuals in equivalent positions at U.S. non-profit research institutions are also encouraged to apply. The degree-date window is the hard filter and it is calendar-based rather than career-stage-based, so an investigator who took a non-academic position before entering faculty ranks can be ruled out by the 2019 cutoff even if they are early in their faculty career; conversely the first-or-second-appointment requirement rules out investigators who are otherwise within the degree window but already on their third appointment. For-profit organizations are not eligible. Proposals must align with naval science and technology priorities, which for AI and machine learning work means the research needs a credible connection to a naval mission context such as maritime or undersea autonomy, unmanned systems, contested-environment sensing, human-machine teaming, or decision support under degraded communications; a general-purpose machine learning advance with no articulated naval relevance is the most common reason strong AI proposals fail here. Prospective applicants should identify and contact the ONR programme officer whose portfolio covers their area before submitting, as YIP awards are made against programme officer research interests. Full proposals are accepted until 30 October 2026 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time; applicants should consult the full NOFO PDF for budget formatting, page limits and submission mechanics. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows awards are typically 750,000 US dollars over a 36-month period of performance, with applicants permitted to request up to 250,000 dollars for each 12-month interval. amount_min is recorded as 250,000, the published single-year ceiling, and amount_max as 750,000, the published full three-year award value. The distinction matters because the 250,000 dollar annual figure is frequently misread as the total award, understating the instrument by a factor of three. ONR states total funding available of 18,750,000 dollars with an anticipated up to 25 awards, which is consistent with 25 awards at 750,000 dollars each and means the programme is funded to its stated award count rather than being heavily oversubscribed at the budget level. At 250,000 dollars per year this is sized to support the principal investigator plus one to two graduate students or a postdoctoral researcher, and it is a prestige early-career instrument rather than a large team grant. Because funding is incremental by 12-month interval, applicants should budget to a flat 250,000 dollar annual profile rather than front-loading equipment purchases. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
Applications for ONR Fiscal Year 2027 Young Investigator Program (N0001426SF004) for Early Career Research in AI, Autonomy and Machine Learning for Naval Systems are due October 30, 2026. Build your timeline backwards from this date to cover registrations, approvals, and final submission checks.
ONR Fiscal Year 2027 Young Investigator Program (N0001426SF004) for Early Career Research in AI, Autonomy and Machine Learning for Naval Systems is funded by U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of the Navy. Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
The ONR Young Investigator Program, running since 1985, is one of the most valuable early-career awards in U.S. defense research: roughly 750,000 dollars over three years, awarded to the individual rather than to a project team, with wide latitude to define the research agenda so long as it addresses an area of interest to an ONR program officer. For AI researchers the relevant areas are autonomous maritime systems, human-machine teaming, machine learning for sensor fusion, and the broader autonomy portfolio that ONR has built out over the past decade. The eligibility window is narrow and strictly enforced: applicants must be in their first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent academic appointment and must have received their PhD or equivalent degree on or after 1 January 2019. Faculty at U.S. institutions of higher education and those holding equivalent positions at U.S. nonprofits are eligible. That date cut-off moves each cycle, so anyone near the boundary should check it against the current NOFO rather than assume continuity from a prior year. The single most important tactical point about YIP, and the one that most distinguishes successful from unsuccessful applicants, is that proposals are evaluated against the interests of specific ONR program officers. Contacting the relevant program officer before writing, to confirm that the proposed direction matches an active need, is effectively a prerequisite rather than a courtesy - unsolicited proposals that no program officer has an appetite for do not fare well regardless of technical quality. The FY2027 competition is NOFO N0001426SF004, with full proposals due 30 October 2026 at 5:00pm Eastern.
The Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program, established in 1985, is the Navy's principal early-career research award and one of the largest such programmes in the US federal government, typically providing 750,000 US dollars over three years to faculty in their first or second tenure-track appointment. Machine learning, autonomous operations and dexterous robotics are consistently represented among funded topics: the FY2026 cohort of 23 awardees, drawn from 22 institutions in 11 states and sharing roughly 17,000,000 US dollars, included work on machine learning, autonomous operations, dexterous robotics, advanced sensors and decision superiority alongside more traditional naval science areas such as ocean acoustics and hypersonics. The FY2027 competition is open under announcement N0001426SF004, with white papers due 30 October 2026. What distinguishes ONR's programme from its Air Force and Army counterparts is both the award size and the tight coupling to programme officer interests: proposals are evaluated against the research areas described by ONR's Science and Technology Departments, and the expected practice is that a prospective applicant contacts the relevant programme officer before writing. For AI and robotics researchers specifically, ONR's interests skew toward autonomy in contested and communications-denied maritime environments, human-machine teaming under uncertainty, multi-agent coordination, and machine learning on sparse, noisy or adversarially corrupted sensor data, which is a meaningfully different framing from the data-rich settings that dominate academic machine learning.
The ONR Long Range Broad Agency Announcement (N00014-25-S-B001) is the Office of Naval Research's primary mechanism for soliciting research proposals across all naval science and technology priority areas. The BAA accepts proposals on a rolling basis through September 30, 2026 and covers ONR's full spectrum of research interests with particular emphasis on AI-related topics including autonomous maritime systems, human-machine teaming, machine learning for sensor fusion, cooperative autonomous swarm technology, undersea autonomy, and AI-enabled decision superiority. Proposals can be funded through multiple mechanisms including individual investigator grants, the Young Investigator Program (~$510K over 3 years for early-career faculty), and Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards ($1.5M/year for 3-5 years for research teams). ONR recommends contacting relevant program officers before submitting to discuss alignment with current research priorities. The BAA supports basic research (6.1), applied research (6.2), and advanced technology development (6.3) across the full range of naval-relevant science and engineering disciplines.
PRIMED-AI is a new NIH Common Fund programme, Precision Medicine with AI: Integrating Imaging with Multimodal Data, which combines medical imaging with other health data to build AI-powered clinical decision support tools for personalised medicine. This opportunity, RFA-RM-27-014, funds the programme's Validation Center: a dedicated hub that independently evaluates and characterises the AI-enabled, image-based multimodal clinical decision support tools developed elsewhere in the consortium. The structural logic matters for applicants. NIH has separated tool-building from tool-validation and is paying separately for the second, which signals institutional recognition that self-reported performance claims from developing teams are not sufficient evidence for clinical AI. The Center's remit covers verification, validation, interoperability and uncertainty quantification, so the deliverable is a reproducible evaluation capability rather than a set of papers. It operates as a U54 cooperative agreement, meaning NIH staff are substantively involved and the Center must work in concert with the PRIMED-AI Logistics Center and the Data-to-Model and Model-to-Clinic award recipients. The RFA was released on 30 June 2026 with applications due 2 October 2026. For academic groups that have built credible AI evaluation methodology, particularly in radiology, imaging informatics or biostatistics, this is an unusually direct route to becoming the reference evaluator for a major federal AI health programme, and the position carries influence over how clinical AI performance gets measured well beyond the life of the award.
RFA-RM-27-015 funds a single Logistics Center as the coordinating hub of the NIH Common Fund's PRIMED-AI program, Precision Medicine with AI: Integrating Imaging with Multimodal Data. The award is a cooperative agreement, meaning substantial NIH scientific and programmatic involvement is built in rather than incidental, and it is administered by NIBIB on behalf of the Common Fund. The Center operates through three integrated cores: Administration, which runs the steering committees and develops consortium policies; Evaluation, which assesses progress across the funded portfolio; and Outreach, which maintains a web portal for sharing AI-based clinical decision support tools and facilitates engagement between researchers, clinicians and patient communities. The strategic point for applicants is that this is the only coordinating award in a multi-award program whose other components, the Data-to-Model Academic-Industrial Partnerships, Model-to-Clinic and Multi-use Frameworks Playbook RFAs, are separately competed and separately funded. The Logistics Center therefore does not generate its own AI models; it is scored on its capacity to run a consortium, set data and tool-sharing policy, and build infrastructure that makes other teams' clinical decision support tools discoverable and reusable. Applications are due by 5:00 PM local time of the applicant organization on the date specified for the relevant review cycle, with an earliest project start date of 2 October 2026 and a maximum project period of five years.
The Department of the Navy pre-released FY26 Release 3 SBIR/STTR on June 3, 2026 — 12 BAA topics and one Commercial Solutions Opening for Counter-Unmanned Air Systems. Topics span adaptive sensor management, anomalous behavior detection, satellite imagery optimization, real-time zero-trust data for combat systems, and gun weapon systems modernization. Technical questions cut off June 23. Proposals open June 24 and close July 22. NAVAIR and NAVSEA co-host a Counter-UAS webinar June 16. Phase I funding tops out at $315,000. The CSO open topic for AI-powered drone defense is the structural news: it's the first time NAVAIR has used a CSO vehicle to fund counter-drone work outside the conventional Phase I/II structure, and it changes how small businesses can engage with the Navy's most urgent capability gap.
Read articleNOFO N0001426SF004 offers roughly 25 awards at $750,000 over 36 months to first- and second-appointment faculty. No cost share, no white paper stage — and an eligibility clock that admits PhDs earned on or after January 1, 2019 and nobody earlier. The program officer conversation, not the proposal, is the part most applicants get wrong.
Read articleOn June 3, the Department of the Navy pre-released FY26 Release 3 SBIR/STTR — 12 conventional BAA topics and a Counter-Unmanned Air Systems Commercial Solutions Opening. Topics span adaptive sensor management, anomalous behavior detection, satellite imagery optimization, real-time zero-trust data for combat systems, and gun weapon systems modernization. The proposal window runs June 24 to July 22, 2026. The technical questions cutoff is June 23. NAVAIR and NAVSEA are hosting a Counter-UAS webinar on June 16. Here is what the topic mix actually signals about Navy priorities and how small businesses should position.
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