This week's Grant Round Up has funding opportunities to help with food insecurity for low-income consumers and two new grants from the National Science Foundation with funding focused on engineering.
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Grant Title: Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Competitive Grant Program
Grant Info: http://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=297637
Details: The Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI) Grant Program for fiscal year (FY) 2018 to support projects to increase the purchase of fruits and vegetables among low-income consumers participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by providing incentives at the point of purchase.
National Science Foundation
Grant Title: Engineering for Civil Infrastructure
Grant Info: http://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=297659
Details: The Engineering for Civil Infrastructure (ECI) program supports fundamental research that will shape the future of our nation's constructed civil infrastructure, subjected to and interacting with the natural environment, to meet the needs of humans. In this context, research driven by radical rethinking of traditional civil infrastructure in response to emerging technological innovations, changing population demographics, and evolving societal needs is encouraged. The ECI program focuses on the physical infrastructure, such as the soil-foundation-structure-envelope-nonstructural building system; geostructures; and underground facilities. It seeks proposals that advance knowledge and methodologies within geotechnical, structural, architectural, materials, coastal, and construction engineering, especially that include collaboration with researchers from other fields, including, for example, biomimetics, bioinspired design, advanced computation, data science, materials science, additive manufacturing, robotics, and control theory. Research may explore holistic building systems that view construction, geotechnical, structural, and architectural design as an integrated system; adaptive building envelope systems; nonconventional building materials; breakthroughs in remediated geological materials; and transformational construction processes. Principal investigators are encouraged to consider civil infrastructure subjected to and interacting with the natural environment; operating conditions; intermediate stress conditions (such as deterioration, and severe locational and climate conditions); and extreme single or multi natural hazard events (including earthquakes, windstorms, tsunamis, storm surges, sinkholes, subsidence, and landslides). Principal investigators are expected to bear in mind broader impacts associated with, for example, economic, environmental, habitant comfort, and societal benefits, which may include implications for resource and energy efficiency, life cycle, adaptability and resilience, and reduced dependence on municipal services and utilities. Principal Investigators are encouraged to leverage NSF, investments in the national experimental facilities of the National Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program https://www.designsafe-ci.org/. Principal Investigators are also urged to make full use of resources available through the NHERI Cyberinfrastructure and NHERI Computational Modeling and Simulation Center awards, especially to both use and share experimental and simulation data, as well as computational models and simulation tools, to accelerate advances in engineering the constructed environment. The ECI Program does not support research on mission agency responsibilities, such as nuclear power plants and energy-related infrastructure, transportation infrastructure (e.g., bridges and pavements), and natural resource exploration or recovery. The ECI Program also does not support research on: hazard characterization for and hazard mitigation of the impact of explosions, fire, blast loading, flooding, and solar wind and storms on civil infrastructure; sensor and measurement technologies; field instrumentation and monitoring; induced seismicity; and construction safety. Research on natural hazard characterization is supported through programs in the NSF Directorate for Geosciences.
Grant Title: Engineering Design and System Engineering
Grant Info: http://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=297660
Details: The Engineering Design and Systems Engineering (EDSE) program supports fundamental research into the basic processes and phenomena of engineering design and systems engineering. The program seeks proposals leading to improved understanding about how processes, organizational structure, social interactions, strategic decision-making, and other factors impact success in the planning and execution of engineering design and systems engineering projects. It also supports advances pertaining to engineering design and systems engineering in areas that include, but are not limited to, decision making under uncertainty, including preference and demand modeling; problem decomposition and decision delegation; applications of reverse game theory (mechanism design); computer-aided design; design representation; system performance modeling and prediction; design optimization; uncertainty quantification; domain- or concern-specific design methods; and advanced computational techniques for supporting effective human cognition, decision making, and collaboration. Competitive proposals for novel methods will include a plan to evaluate rigorously the effectiveness and performance of the proposed approach. The EDSE program encourages multidisciplinary collaborations of experts in design and systems engineering with experts in other domains. Of particular interest is research on the design of engineering material systems that leverages the unique aspects of a particular material system to realize advanced design methods that are driven by performance metrics and incorporate processing/manufacturing considerations. The EDSE program does not support the development of ad-hoc approaches that lack grounding in theory, nor does it support design activities that do not advance scientific knowledge about engineering design or systems engineering. Prospective investigators are encouraged to discuss research ideas and project scope with the Program Director in advance of proposal preparation and submission. The program does not support fundamental research in materials synthesis, analysis and characterization, nor in device physics and performance evaluation. Rather, the focus of the program is on nano-scale manufacturing at both the mass and customized scales.