Harvard Pre-Proposal Deadline: July 19, 2021 
Sponsor Deadline (if nominated): September 24, 2021
Award Amount: Up to $300,000; budgets commonly range from $175,000 to $250,000  

New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest. The program is intended to enable scholars in the humanities to work on problems that interest them most, at an appropriately advanced level of sophistication. In addition to facilitating the work of individual faculty members, these awards should benefit scholarship in the humanities more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research. The principal criteria for selection are:

• The overall significance of the research;
• The case for the importance of extra-disciplinary training for furthering the research;
• The likely ability of the candidate to derive satisfactory results from the training program proposed; and
• A well-developed plan for acquiring the necessary training within a reasonable period of time.

Deadline to Request Harvard Institutional Endorsement: September 14, 2021 by 10:00 AM

Sponsor Deadline: September 22, 2021
Award Amount: $70,000 per year for two years (taxable)

The objective of the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships Program, offered by the Government of Canada, is to attract and retain top-tier postdoctoral talent, to develop Fellows’ leadership potential and to position them for success as research leaders of tomorrow, positively contributing to Canada's economic, social and research-based growth through a research-intensive career. Applications are accepted from all fields in the humanities, social sciences, health research, natural sciences and engineering.

This program is open to Canadian citizens, permanent residents of Canada and non-Canadian citizens. Candidates to be hosted by Harvard must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada who have obtained or will obtain their PhD or equivalent from a Canadian university. Applicants must fulfill or have fulfilled all degree requirements for a PhD, PhD-equivalent or health professional degree between September 15, 2018 and September 30, 2022 (inclusively), and before the start date of their award. Applicants who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada may apply to hold a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at a Canadian institution. Applicants who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada and who obtained their PhD, PhD-equivalent or health professional degree from a non-Canadian university may also apply to hold a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at a Canadian institution. The program’s full eligibility criteria can be viewed here.   

There are no limits to the number of applicants that may apply to the Banting Fellowship opportunity, but those who wish to be hosted by Harvard University must include with their application an Institutional Letter of Endorsement signed by the Vice Provost for Research. To request this endorsement letter, candidates must submit their contact information and a copy of their proposed supervisor's statement here no later than 10:00 AM on September 14, 2021. 

The Trust makes grant awards twice a year to nonprofit organizations in the city of Boston and contiguous communities, as well as to organizations in which Cabot family members maintain philanthropic interest. Awards are put to work in the areas of arts and culture, education and youth development, environment and conservation, health and human services, and for civic and public benefit. Within these fields, as appropriate, the trustees prefer programs mainly serving youth and young adults, with a special interest in programs focused on insuring the healthy growth and development of infants and young children, as a foundation for their future success. Applications recommended for review meet the following criteria:

• Reflect Cabot family interests and provide benefits to communities and organizations that have been supported by family philanthropy;
• Extend important services to individuals and groups not served adequately through other programs and institutions;
• Manage change by assessing community needs and developing programs to meet emerging needs;
• Promote productive cooperation and full use of resources by nonprofit organizations and community groups; and
• Test new approaches to problems or adapt solutions that have been successful elsewhere.

• Marjorie Kovler Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $5,000 for research on foreign intelligence and the presidency, or a related topic.
• Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $5,000. Preference is given to research in either of the following areas: the foreign policy of the Kennedy Presidency, especially in the Western Hemisphere; or the Kennedy Administration's domestic policy, particularly with regard to racial justice or the conservation of natural resources.
• Abba P. Schwartz Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $3,100. Preference is given to research on immigration, naturalization, or refugee policy.
• Theodore C. Sorensen Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $3,600. Preference is given to research on domestic policy, political journalism, polling, or press relations.

• Innovative research into the causes, the prevention and/or the alleviation of learning disabilities
• Distinctive public awareness programs to advance public understanding of the needs of persons with learning disabilities
• Innovative programs to advance the achievement of persons with learning disabilities, increase the support skills of their families, support academic and professional advisors, and enhance the understanding of learning disabilities by their colleagues and employer

The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study awards 10-15 residential Faculty Fellowships annually to researchers whose work addresses the Institute’s yearly Research Theme. During the 2022-2023 academic year, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study is sponsoring research projects that investigate the concept of The Public from many disciplines and applications. The project will bring together humanists, scientists, social scientists, legal scholars, and artists to examine how we organize individuals, political and scientific institutions, cultural resources, and informational structures into public, private, and expert domains. Potential research proposal topics on The Public may address, but are not limited to:

• Public Health: How can we make health systems that better reflect the diversity of the populations they are meant to serve? How can scientists better inform debates about what governments mandate from a public health perspective? What research trends now will inform the future of public-facing sciences?
• Environmental Science and Humanities: What role can public institutions play in addressing large-scale collective action problems involving the natural world? Taking into account our best science, what detrimental environmental trends are best addressed by public interventions vs. private or individual interventions?
• Technology and Engineering: How has the emergence and spread of social media transformed the conception of the public sphere? How might developments in data analysis and surveillance challenge individuals’ relationships with governments and private entities? As engineering gets more and more advanced, what role do engineers have in helping the public understand the products they create? What can research show us about the future of digital public life?
• Political Science and Law: What is “the public” and how many publics are there? What are the barriers to enter/exit a public sphere? What moral obligations do political institutions have to create or remove such barriers? What can research show us about the future of civic life in different regional contexts and the future of public service careers?
• Architecture / Urban Planning: What public spaces belong in modern cities and how should they be designed and maintained? How should we understand infrastructure in the 21st century?
• Philosophy and Social Theory: Do large groups have rights, or are rights only held by individuals? What does it mean for evidence or reasons to be public? Does it matter for standards of rationality if we have reasons that cannot be widely shared? How should political, educational, and economic institutions balance meritocratic, egalitarian, and democratic values?
• History and Literature: How have our concepts of what characterizes the public realm developed over time or changed in light of recent disruptions? What role have public intellectuals had in the past, and how do they compare to public-facing intellectuals of the present? How do literature and history shed light on the difficulties individuals face entering or exiting public life?
• Religion: How should we understand institutional disaffiliation trends among religions, accelerated by recent crises? What duties do we have to create or limit religious ideas in the public sphere? To what extent is religion a common good, and how does it compete with other common goods? What should public theology look like going forward?
• Arts and Culture: How do arts and culture help us understand what it is to be a unified or disunified public, or help us understand the extent to which arts and culture have duties to the public? The NDIAS is also interested in supporting creative works—fiction writing, visual arts, musical composition, etc.—that explore or address issues related to our theme.

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) dedicates itself to strengthening the methods, data, and theoretical core of the social sciences as a means of diagnosing social problems and improving social policies. It also funds researchers and supports programs intended to develop new generations of social scientists. For the July deadline, RSF is accepting letters of inquiry for the following core programs:

• Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration supports innovative investigator-initiated research on the social, economic, and political effects of the changing racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. population, including the transformation of communities and ideas about what it means to be American. 
• Social Political and Economic Inequality supports innovative research on the factors that contribute to social, political and economic inequalities in the U.S., and the extent to which those inequalities affect social, psychological, political, and economic outcomes, including educational access, job opportunities, social mobility, civic participation and representation, and the transmission of advantage and disadvantage within and across generations.
• RSF will also accept LOIs relevant to any of its core programs that address at least one of the following issues:
  • Research on the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting recession in the U.S.: Specifically, research that assesses the social, political, economic, and psychological causes and consequences of the pandemic, especially its effects on marginalized individuals and groups and on trust in government and other institutions.
  • Research focused on systemic racial inequality and/or the recent mass protests in the U.S.

Through its grant-making, the foundation seeks to develop solutions to the country’s most important and challenging domestic policy issues. Recognizing that good policymaking relies on the availability of high-quality research, the foundation invests primarily in scholarship that results in the publication of books, journal articles, and policy papers. Funding is typically provided in the form of research grants, fellowships, and other types of targeted project support. With the foundation’s assistance, university and think tank scholars investigate a wide range of issues, including:

• Tax and budget policy
• Cost-benefit analysis of regulatory practices and proposals
• The workings of the legal system
• Environmental policy
• Social welfare reform
• K-12 and higher education policy

• Research Grants on Reducing Inequality - The Foundation seeks studies to build, test, and increase understanding of responses to inequality in youth outcomes.
• Research Grants on Improving the Use of Research Evidence - The Foundation seeks studies about how to improve the use of research evidence in ways that benefit youth.

• Army Research Office (ARO)
• Office of Naval Research (ONR)
• Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)

• Topic 1: Social Network-Transcendent Behavioral Dynamics
• Topic 2: Microelectronic Test Science Exploiting Latent Energy and Electromagnetic Radiation
• Topic 3: Cavity Molecular Polaritons
• Topic 4: Effects of Radiation Damage on Performance of Wide-Bandgap Electronics
• Topic 5: Understanding Neural Systems Integration for Competent Autonomy in Decision and Control
• Topic 6: Nonlinear Optical Material Design with Extreme Interband Nonlinearities
• Topic 7: Synthetic Quantum Matter
• Topic 8: Composability of Synthetic Biological Circuits

• Topic 9: Bio-architected Responsive Materials with 3D Nanoscale Order
• Topic 10: Topological Seeds of Complex Response in Materials
• Topic 11: Connectivity and Transport in Disordered Hyperuniform Networks
• Topic 12: Irregular Metamaterial Networks
• Topic 13: Uncovering the Underlying Neurobiological Mechanisms of Cognitive Fatigue
• Topic 14: Gut-Neuronal Signaling Through Polymeric Mucin via Chemical Probes and Imaging
• Topic 15: ELECTROBIOLOGY: Electronic Control of Biological Communication

• Topic 16: Novel Routes to Majorana Qubits for Topologically-Protected Quantum Information
• Topic 17: Molecular Doping of Organic Electronic Materials
• Topic 18: Learning from Hearing
• Topic 19: Hydrodynamics of Fish Schooling
• Topic 20: Self-learning for Real-world Perception
• Topic 21: Fundamental Non-equilibrium Processes in Weakly Ionized Hypersonic Flows
• Topic 22: Ab Initio Understanding of Detonation Based Combustion in Multiphase Mixtures
• Topic 23: Bioinspired Design of Energy-Self Sufficient Multi-functional Soft Material Systems
• Topic 24: Systems-Level Foundations for Agile, Dynamic, and Ad Hoc Human Autonomy Teams
• Topic 25: Environmental DNA-based Monitoring of the Marine Environment (EDMON)

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks proposals to publish documentary editions of historical records. The NHPRC especially welcomes projects that focus on broad historical movements in U.S. history, such as law (including the social and cultural history of the law), politics, social reform, business, military, the arts, and other aspects of the national experience, including any aspect of African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American history. Projects may also center on the papers of major figures from American history.

The Commission is especially interested in projects to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The NHPRC encourages applications that use collections to examine the ideals behind the founding of the United States and the continual interpretation and debate over those ideals over the past 250 years. The NHPRC welcomes projects that engage the public, expand civic education, and promote understanding of the nation’s history, democracy, and culture from the founding era to the present day.

FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: July 21, 2021
Sponsor Deadline: July 28, 2021
Award Amount: up to $1M over up to 4 years

The Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) Solicitation supports research projects that take a systems approach to advance fundamental understanding of how networks that traffic in illicit or illicitly-produced goods and services operate, leading to technological breakthroughs that bolster our ability to disable these networks. Major goals of NSF’s D-ISN Solicitation include:

• Improve understanding of the operations of illicit supply networks and strengthen the ability to detect, disrupt, and dismantle them. 
• Support research on the illicit supply networks that fuel the national opioid epidemic 
• Enhance research communities that effectively integrate operational, computational, social, cultural and economic expertise to provide methods and strategies to combat this complex and elusive global security challenge.
• Catalyze game-changing technological innovations that can improve discovery and traceability of illicitly sourced product inputs.
• Provide research outcomes that inform U.S. national security, law enforcement and economic development needs and policies.

FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: July 27, 2021
Sponsor Deadline: August 3, 2021
Award Amount: $600,000 - $1M over up to 3 years

NSF and Amazon are partnering to jointly support computational research focused on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to transparency, explainability, accountability, inclusivity, potential adverse biases (including social biases) and effects, mitigation strategies, algorithmic advances, fairness objectives, validation of fairness, participatory design, and advances in broad accessibility and utility. Funded projects will enable broadened acceptance of AI systems, helping the U.S. to further capitalize on the potential of AI technologies. Although Amazon provides partial funding for this program, it will not play a role in the selection of proposals for award.

Advancing AI is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor drawing on fields such as computer science, information science, engineering, statistics, mathematics, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, decision science, and economics. Considerations of practice, often derived from the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, can inform new directions for computational science to better realize the benefits of algorithmic and data fairness. As such, NSF and Amazon expect these varied perspectives to be critical for the study of fairness in AI. NSF's ability to bring together multiple scientific disciplines uniquely positions the agency in this collaboration, while building AI that is fair and unbiased is an important aspect of Amazon's AI initiatives. This program supports the conduct of fundamental computer science research into theories, techniques, and methodologies that go well beyond today's capabilities and are motivated by challenges and requirements in real systems.

This notice solicits applications for projects for the Accessing Social Determinants of Health through Local Data Intermediaries Initiative. A local data intermediary is a community-based entity that acts as the mediator between data and local stakeholders, such as nonprofit organizations, community and faith-based organizations, governments, foundations and residents. The purpose of this initiative is to demonstrate whether existing local data intermediaries can facilitate community stakeholder access to and utilization of integrated community-level data, and increase community stakeholder skill and capacity to use and apply data to address health disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations.

OMH expects the projects funded through this initiative to result in: (1) increased utilization of integrated community-level SDOH/social need/social risk and health data to develop local policies, programs and practices to address health disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations; and (2) increased capacity of community stakeholders to use data to make data-informed decisions to improve the health of racial and ethnic minority and disadvantaged populations. 

• U.S. Global Development Lab: Development Innovation Ventures - Rolling
• See all USAID Opportunities