USDA NIFA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Education and Workforce Development (AFRI-EWD) Program for Agricultural Data Science and AI Workforce Training

1890 Institution Teaching, Research and Extension Capacity Building Grants Program is sponsored by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). This program supports scientific research that addresses agricultural challenges and builds capacity for teaching, research, and extension activities at 1890 Land-grant Universities (HBCUs). While the primary focus is agriculture, financial management is listed as an eligible major for related scholarship programs, suggesting that projects related to financial literacy within an agricultural or rural community context might be considered as part of workforce development or extension activities.

Capacity Building Grants for Non-Land-Grant Colleges of Agriculture Program (NLGCA) is sponsored by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The NLGCA Program assists eligible institutions in maintaining and expanding their capacity to conduct education, research, and outreach activities related to food, agriculture, and natural resources.

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.