NSF Announces Over $1.5 Billion for Foundational Research to Foster Innovation

According to NSF News, the U.S. National Science Foundation has issued 12 new notices of funding opportunity (NOFOs) that provide more than $1.5 billion for foundational research, encompassing basic and use-inspired inquiry within the sciences and engineering. These funding opportunities support the primary objective outlined in the administration's memorandum, "Ushering in a New Golden Age of American Innovation: Fiscal Year 2028 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities," which calls for investment in the foundational research that serves as the basis for American science and technology leadership. The announcement also addresses a key premise from the report Science: A New Golden Age, suggesting that America must adapt to shifts in the scientific field and create conditions for more frequent and rapid exceptional scientific progress.

NSF intends to employ a portfolio-based strategy for federal grantmaking, deliberately matching funding mechanisms, institutional models, research modalities, and grant lengths to the specific nature of the research. The NOFOs released today will support a combination of long-horizon awards for ambitious, transformative research and quick short-term grants designed to test promising ideas rapidly.

These NOFOs advance NSF's core mission to back foundational research that results in scientific breakthroughs and opens new areas of knowledge. NSF asserts that its investments in foundational research underpin technological innovation across various industries, thereby strengthening U.S. economic competitiveness, improving national security, and enhancing the quality of life for all Americans. The funding opportunities place specific emphasis on bold, paradigm-challenging investigations, foundational research that creates new interdisciplinary connections, and projects that utilize artificial intelligence, advanced computation, and automation to enable qualitatively new science.

Brian Stone, Performing the Duties of the NSF Director, stated that the investment being announced would allow researchers to speed up fundamental research, leading to the transformational breakthroughs necessary for the future. Michael Kratsios, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted that the administration made foundational research in the sciences and engineering a national priority in Science: A New Golden Age. He added that NSF's current investments ensure the United States continues to drive the scientific breakthroughs underpinning future industries and will support a wider spectrum of meritorious science by aligning award size, speed, and duration with the research being supported.

The new opportunities reflect a broader array of R&D funding mechanisms so that the award structure better suits the intended research. Where scientifically justified, researchers are encouraged to seek awards providing up to five years of support for long-term, ambitious research questions, enabling focus on truly paradigm-shifting work rather than incremental results needed for subsequent awards. To quickly test and reduce risk for novel concepts, researchers are also encouraged to utilize NSF's existing rapid, short-term grant mechanisms more frequently.

Many of the new solicitations will also facilitate structured experiments regarding how NSF supports discovery. NSF intends to rigorously evaluate and confirm whether alterations in proposal design, award duration, review methods, and funding speed improve the quality and ambition of scientific outcomes. NSF plans to scale these changes over time as appropriate, thereby building the metascience capabilities and a self-improving scientific enterprise as called for in the administration's FY 2028 R&D budget priorities memorandum.

The new solicitations are shorter, fewer in number, and easier to navigate, which opens NSF's funding avenues to a wider segment of the nation and advances NSF's ongoing efforts to lessen the paperwork burden. These also complement NSF's announcement from last winter regarding pilot changes to the merit review process, including new methods to bring forward unconventional proposals that might not pass through traditional consensus-driven review panels. Early-career researchers are specifically encouraged to apply across the funding opportunities.