DECEMBER 8, 2021
Federal Funding Opportunities
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will establish and expand partnerships with academic, healthcare, and other organizations to address infection prevention and control (IPC) failure modes; enhance correct implementation of IPC protocols and processes; and strengthen healthcare worker training and competency assessment. This funding opportunity supports activities to assess and remove barriers to success; improve communication of IPC information and instructions to healthcare workers; and understand how to optimize the layout and functional flow of healthcare environments and processes. It will support organizations uniquely positioned to advance the design, delivery, and effectiveness of IPC training, education, and competency assessment to improve healthcare worker IPC practice and increase health department ability to support healthcare IPC and outbreak response. The work conducted supports public health and healthcare practice by informing development of guidance and recommendations; translating guidance and recommendations into practices implementable in diverse healthcare settings; and improving how healthcare and public health personnel are trained and how competencies are assessed.
Through the expansion of experiential training opportunities in nurse-led community-based settings, the purpose of this mobile health training program is to increase and strengthen the diversity, education, and training of the nursing workforce to provide culturally aligned quality care in rural and underserved areas where there are health care disparities related to access and delivery of care. This program will provide enhanced education and training opportunities within collaborative, reciprocal partnerships, utilizing community-based, nurse-led mobile units. This program aims to strengthen the capacity of nursing students to address and manage social determinants of health and improve health equity for vulnerable populations in rural and underserved areas; and to expand on the nursing education provided by emphasizing leadership and effective communication skills as well as innovative technological methods (i.e. telehealth) to deliver quality care in a rural or underserved environment.
National Endowment for the Arts announces 2022 deadlines for Grants for Arts Projects
Through project-based funding, this program supports public engagement with, and access to, various forms of art across the nation, the creation of art, learning in the arts at all stages of life, and the integration of the arts into the fabric of community life. This program funds arts projects in the following disciplines: Artist Communities, Arts Education, Dance, Design, Folk and Traditional Arts, Literary Arts, Local Arts Agencies, Media Arts, Museums, Music, Musical Theater, Opera, Presenting and Multidisciplinary Arts, Theater, and Visual Arts.
The main goal of the Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program is to enable low-income students with academic ability, talent or potential to pursue successful careers in promising STEM fields. Recognizing that financial aid alone cannot increase retention and graduation in STEM, the program provides awards to institutions of higher education not only to fund scholarships, but also to adapt, implement, and study evidence-based curricular and co-curricular activities that have been shown to be effective supporting recruitment, retention, transfer, student success, academic/career pathways, and graduation in STEM.
The STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (STEM Ed PRF) program funds individual and institutional postdoctoral awards designed to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctoral graduates in STEM, STEM Education, Education, and related disciplines, with a goal of advancing their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research in STEM education that advances knowledge within the field.
The Understanding the Rules of Life: Emergent Networks (URoL:EN) program aims to develop a predictive understanding of how key properties of living systems emerge from interactions of factors such as genomes, phenotypes, and environments and how emerging networks of organismal, natural, social, and/or human-engineered systems respond to or influence evolving environments. Successful projects of the URoL:EN program are expected to use convergent approaches that explore emergent network properties of living systems across various levels of organizational scale and, ultimately, to contribute to understanding the rules of life through new theories and reliable predictions about the impact of specific environmental changes on behaviors of complex living systems, or engineerable interventions and technologies based on a rule of life to address associated outcomes for societal benefit.
The overarching vision of this program is to support multi-disciplinary research to sustain economic competitiveness, to promote worker well-being, lifelong and pervasive learning, and quality of life, and to illuminate the emerging social and economic context and drivers of innovations that are shaping the future of jobs and work. The specific objectives are to:
- Facilitate multi-disciplinary or convergent research that employs the joint perspectives, methods, and knowledge of behavioral science, computer science, economics, engineering, learning sciences, research on adult learning and workforce training, and the social sciences;
- Develop deeper understandings of how human needs can be met and values respected in regard to how new technologies, conditions, and work experiences are changing;
- Support deeper understanding of the societal infrastructure that accompanies and leads to new work technologies and new approaches to work and jobs, and that prepares people for the future world of work;
- Encourage the development of a research community dedicated to designing intelligent technologies and work organization and modes inspired by their positive impact on individual workers, the work at hand, the way people learn and adapt to technological change, creative and inclusive workplaces (including remote locations, homes, classrooms, or virtual spaces), and benefits for social, economic, educational, and environmental systems at different scales;
- Promote deeper basic understanding of the interdependent human-technology partnership to advance societal needs by advancing design of intelligent technologies that operate in harmony with human workers, including consideration of how adults learn the new skills needed to interact with these technologies in the workplace, and by enabling broad and diverse workforce participation, including improving accessibility for those challenged by physical or cognitive impairment; and
- Understand, anticipate, and explore ways of mitigating potential risks including inequity arising from future work at the human-technology frontier.
Proposals to this program should describe multi-disciplinary or convergent research that addresses technological, human, and societal dimensions of future work. Technological innovations should be integrated with advances in behavioral science, computer science, economic science, engineering, learning sciences, research on adult learning and workforce training, and the social sciences. Proposals that address the impact of large-scale disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic on the future of jobs and work are also of interest.
National Science Foundation releases new Smart and Connected Communities solicitation
The Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program encourages researchers to work with community stakeholders to identify and define challenges they are facing, enabling those challenges to motivate use-inspired research questions. The S&CC program supports integrative research that addresses fundamental technological and social science dimensions of smart and connected communities and pilots solutions together with communities. Importantly, this program is interested in projects that consider the sustainability of the research outcomes beyond the life of the project, including the scalability and transferability of the proposed solutions.
