Good Morning,
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the call for proposals for the 2023 DARPA Young Faculty Awards (YFA). The YFA program will provide high-impact funding to elite researchers early in their careers to develop innovative new research that enables transformative DoD capabilities. More information on the award can be found in the synopsis below:
DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA)
Sponsor Deadline for Executive Summaries (strongly encouraged): November 30, 2022
FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: January 31, 2023
Sponsor Deadline for Full Proposals: February 7, 2023
Award Amount: Each award will include a 24-month base period (up to $250,000 per year, maximum of $500,000) and a 12-month option period (maximum of $500,000) referred to as the “Director’s Fellowship,” which is reserved for a limited number of awardees who demonstrate exceptional YFA project performance over the base period.
The DARPA Young Faculty Award program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior research positions in academia and equivalent positions at non-profit research institutions, particularly those without prior DARPA funding, to expose them to Department of Defense needs and DARPA’s mission to create and prevent technological surprise. Participation is open to individuals who are U.S. Citizens, U.S. Permanent Residents, and Foreign Nationals who meet the following eligibility criteria by the full proposal deadline: current Tenure-Track Assistant/Associate Professors; current Tenured faculty within 3 years of their Tenure date; or an equivalent at a non-profit research institution within 12 years of the receipt of their Ph.D. Recipients of non-YFA DARPA awards are eligible to propose, and submissions to young investigator programs sponsored by other agencies are not restricted. Once awards are made, each YFA program performer will be assigned a DARPA Program Manager with interests closely related to their research topic. The Program Manager will act as project manager and mentor to the YFA award recipients. As part of the program, a number of visits/exercises at a variety of DoD sites and facilities will be scheduled.
DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in areas of interest to DARPA’s six technical offices: Biological Technologies Office (BTO), Defense Sciences Office (DSO), Information Innovation Office (I2O), Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), Strategic Technology Office (STO), and Tactical Technology Office (TTO). This Research Announcement (RA) solicits single principal investigator (PI) proposals for research and development in the following specific Topic Areas:
- Models of Central Auditory Processing to Accelerate Therapeutic Advances
- Biocomposites for Thermal Management of Electronics
- Desorption and Capture of CO2 for Bioproducts
- Biocompatible Soft Batteries
- Dendritic Morphology and Physiology in Computation (DMPC)
- Coolscaping
- Biomimetic Prophylaxes for Sepsis
- Materials Testing for Design
- Miniaturized Battery-free Wireless Force Sensing and Communication
- Enabling Radical Scientific Advancements in Synthetic Biology/Chemistry Manufacturing
- Cellular Agriculture
- Harnessing the Power and Energy of Mini-magnetospheres
- Fundamental Limits of Noise-Engineered Metrology
- Enhancement of Two-Phase Heat Transfer for Thermal Management of 3D Heterogeneous Microsystems
- Thermal Physics, Modeling, and Metrology of Wide Bandgap and Ultra-wide Bandgap Semiconductors
- Chip-Scale Ultrafast Photonics
- Materials Research for Printed Dielectrics
- Monolithic Acoustoelectric Microwave Integrated Circuits (MAMIC)
- Hyperdimensional Learning for Efficient Edge Intelligence
- Impact of Material and Deposition on Intrinsic Acoustic Material Limits at mmWave
- Learning Relations for Formal Proof
- Augmented Reality Personnel Protection
- Energy and Resource-Aware Computing at the Edge (ENGRACE)
- Causal Reinforcement Learning
- Rapid Mission-Specific Customization (RaMS-C)
- Spectrum Sharing and Performance of Radar Systems
- Neutron Transport Uncertainty Reduction for Thermal Spectrum Nuclear Thermal Rocket Reactors
At the executive summary phase, proposing PIs are limited to one executive summary per topic area; at the full proposal phase, proposing PIs are limited to submitting only one full proposal to only one topic under this RA.
Lists of previously funded proposals can be found here.
Questions about this announcement may be directed to Erin Hale at erin_hale@fas.harvard.edu or Susan Gomes at sgomes@fas.harvard.edu.