Nsf eager proposal
As indicated above, the revised intellectual merit review criterion explicitly references potentially transformative concepts as a review consideration for all proposals. Nsf program officers are requested to identify potentially transformative research proposals for funding in all programs. Nsf program officers are also expected to provide guidance to panelists and ad hoc reviewers to identify potentially transformative research proposals in their addition to encouraging the submission of proposals for transformative research through all nsf programs, nsf supports specific investment areas, special mechanisms, and new methodologies of identifying and funding potentially transformative encourages potentially transformative research proposals in specific investment annual nsf budget to congress identifies investment areas that are notable for being interdisciplinary, supported by numerous nsf directorates, and intended to have transformative impact across science and engineering fields. Eager funding mechanism can be used to support exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. Principal investigators (pis) must contact the nsf program officer(s) whose expertise is most germane to the proposal topic prior to submission of an eager proposal to determine the appropriateness of the work for consideration under the eager mechanism.
The eager mechanism should not be used for projects that are appropriate for submission as "regular" (i. The objective of such extensions is to offer an extended opportunity to attack adventurous, "high-risk" opportunities in the same general research area, but not necessarily covered by the original/current proposal. Special creativity extensions are generally initiated by the nsf program officer based on progress during the first two years of a three-year grant; pis will be informed of such action a year in advance of the expiration of the lishment-based accomplishment based renewal is a special type of renewal proposal appropriate only for an investigator who has made significant contributions, over a number of years, in the area of research addressed by the proposal. Investigators are strongly urged to contact the cognizant program officer prior to developing a proposal using this format. All other information required for nsf proposal submission remains the pment of new methodologies to promote and support potentially transformative addition to its existing programs and mechanisms as indicated above, nsf continues to experiment with innovative approaches to promote and identify potentially transformative research.
Several programs are experimenting with modifications in the review process to help identify potentially transformative research proposals. With this approach, a panel provides an assessment of potentially transformative research of the proposals. Based on this input, efri prioritizes the topics and calls for proposals in the selected areas through its program factory sandpit. Some directorates, offices, or divisions provide joint support for potentially transformative research proposals that are recommended for funding by program officers. But telang didn’t have enough preliminary data to win a grant to study the issue from the national science foundation (nsf), which last year funded only 22% of the nearly 50,000 proposals it ately for telang, nsf offers a funding mechanism that supports the type of exploratory research he wanted to conduct.
S research is being funded by nsf’s early-concept grants for exploratory research (eager) program, which eschews the agency’s usual reliance on outside peer reviewers and puts the agency’s program staff in the driver’s seat. In recent years, the program has had an even higher batting average—95% in 2011 and 91% in e those overwhelmingly favorable odds, the 5-year-old program doles out only one-fifth of what some senior nsf officials think the foundation should be spending on eager grants. S website describes eager as a vehicle for “untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. S an apt description of telang’s response to a “dear colleague” letter inviting eager proposals under nsf’s secure and trustworthy cyberspace (satc) initiative. Unique” is an important word for nsf program officers who must weigh an eager proposal.
We don’t really know what it is, but we can recognize it when we see it,” one veteran staffer -director arden bement launched eager in 2009 as one of two programs that would rely on in-house reviews. At the bottom is nsf’s social, behavioral, and economic sciences (sbe) directorate, which received only 11 eager proposals last year—and funded 10 of them. In contrast, the computing and information sciences directorate (cise) topped the list by reviewing 171 proposals—all but six of which were gianchandani, deputy director for the division of computer and network systems (cns) within cise, which teamed up with sbe on the satc letter, says eager gives nsf a way to test the waters before deciding whether to issue a full solicitation on any particular topic. We’re a relatively young, rapidly evolving discipline,” gianchandani says about cns, “and eager lets us try out new research threads. Instead, any follow-up research must be funded through one of nsf’s regular the same time, eagers offer some advantages.
They also feature a quicker turnaround time, as program officers don’t have to convene an outside panel and wait for its judgment on the value and soundness of the research proposal. Instead, a group of nsf staffers vets the application and moves it up the chain of e reviewers would have been superfluous on his eager proposal, telang believes. Unlike with a standard proposal, he says, “this is not a case in which we had already done 25% of the work, and they could evaluate it. Program officers are often faced with making very difficult judgments about a proposal,” he says. Eager awards should be reserved for situations, he says, in which “a pi [principal investigator] has a brilliant new way to tackle a problem, but lacks the resources to collect the preliminary data needed to show that it’s possible.
The relative scarcity of eager awards within the directorate—51 proposals, of which 49 were funded—reflect that narrow definition, he , who left nsf in 2010 and returned to purdue university in west lafayette, indiana, where he is now director emeritus of its global policy research institute, agrees that such views are widespread among nsf staffers. The purpose of eager is to encourage high-risk research at the frontier, and there may be more opportunities to do that in some disciplines than in others. In fact, there’s much more back-and-forth between researchers and nsf program staff on eager proposals than on regular submissions. Scientists thinking about submitting an eager proposal are required to talk first to a program officer, for starters. Some nsf programs go even further, requiring a brief description of the proposed research and then weeding out those ideas deemed not a good doesn’t keep any statistics on that give-and-take, however, so it’s impossible to know what proportion of initial eager pitches are ultimately successful.
That’s also true for the much smaller rapid program, which reported a nearly perfect 98% success rate last year on 123 proposals. A data-driven approach is well-suited to the goals of the eager program, says nsf’s xu.