December 22, 2022
Federal Funding Opportunities
The Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) Capital Readiness Program is designed to help close the entrepreneurship gap between socially and economically disadvantaged individuals (SEDI) and non-SEDI. This notice requests applications from qualified organizations that have the expertise to provide technical assistance for entrepreneurs starting or scaling their businesses who are seeking various forms of capital. Specifically, MBDA expects this Program to serve SEDI-owned businesses that are applying, have previously applied, or plan to apply to a State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) capital program or other government program that supports small businesses.
This funding opportunity seeks to support to research and development of high-impact, cost-effective technologies and practices that will reduce carbon emissions, improve flexibility and resilience, as well as lower energy costs across five topic areas:
- Topic 1: Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and Water Heating: Technologies with improved materials, components, equipment design and engineering, lower cost manufacturing processes, and easier installation.
- Topic 2: Thermal Energy Storage (TES): Development and validation of next generation plug-and-play TES products with improved cost and performance and ease of installation to accelerate adoption of TES in HVAC applications.
- Topic 3: Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS): Development, validation, and demonstration of product innovations that reduce the cost of BESS integration, improve the coordination between distributed BESS and the electrical grid, as well as help meet building decarbonization targets.
- Topic 4: Plug Loads/Lighting: Integration of plug load controls with connected lighting systems in commercial buildings with minimal cost and complexity to support building electrification.
- Topic 5: Opaque Building Envelope: Development, validation, and demonstration of high-impact, affordable. opaque building envelope retrofit and diagnostic technologies.
The Office of Science (SC) seeks applications from institutions historically underrepresented in the SC portfolio, including non-R1 minority serving institutions (MSIs) and emerging research institutions, to perform basic research in fields supported by SC. This funding opportunity aims to build research capacity, infrastructure, and expertise at these institutions through mutually beneficial relationships between applicants and U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, SC scientific user facilities, or R1 MSIs. SC supports fundamental research in applied mathematics, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, isotope research, materials science, and physics to transform our understanding of nature and catalyze scientific discoveries that can lead to technical breakthroughs. SC does not support applied research, product development, or prototyping.
This funding opportunity invites applications from eligible academic and research institutions to apply for funding to modernize existing or construct new biomedical research facilities. Applications from both research-intensive institutions and Institutions of Emerging Excellence in biomedical research, both highly resourced and low-resourced institutions, from all geographic regions in the nation are strongly encouraged to apply. The National Institutes of Health recognizes the importance of all institutions of higher learning in contributing to the nation’s research capacity. The goal of this funding opportunity is to modernize biomedical research infrastructure to strengthen biomedical research programs. Each project is expected to provide long-term improvements to the institutional research infrastructure. Targeted projects are the construction or modernization of core facilities and the development of other shared research infrastructure serving an institution-wide research community with broad impact on biomedical research.
National Science Foundation Strengthening American Infrastructure proposals due March 15, 2023
The Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) program seeks to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research aimed at strengthening America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad improvement in quality of life. Strong, reliable and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security and fuels American leadership. Achieving these objectives requires the integration of expertise from across all science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how fundamental knowledge about human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. Successful projects will represent a convergence of expertise in one or more social, behavioral, or economic sciences, deeply integrated with other disciplines to support substantial and potentially pathbreaking fundamental research applied to strengthening a specific focal infrastructure.
The Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing (DESC) solicitation seeks to bring together teams to work toward solutions that address sustainability in new and measurably different ways that are inclusive of the breadth of computing and information science and engineering research, with the ultimate goal of holistic order of magnitude improvements in the environmental sustainability of computing. DESC projects should go beyond solely energy efficiency to address a more complete set of environmentally sustainable outcomes in terms of, but not limited to, metrics of greenhouse gas emissions, volatile organic compounds, consumption and disposal of rare materials, heat, wastewater, recyclability, and longevity, along with potential interactions between these metrics.
