NSF Grant – Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE)
This PIRE competition invites visionary, ambitious, interdisciplinary, use-inspired research proposals that address scientific challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy.
Many cutting-edge research questions require international collaboration to achieve important advances. They also require insights from diverse disciplines to address the full complexity of the research, as well as active participation of stakeholders outside of academia to ensure research findings connect to real-world solutions to societal challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Climate change and clean energy research teams that incorporate some of these characteristics are increasingly common, but many have not had the opportunity to fully integrate all elements into their research agenda. This PIRE program invites PIs to develop these partnerships to exploit their full potential in the future.
The projects will utilize multi-stakeholder and international partnerships that are essential to address these challenges of critical societal importance at a regional or global scale. The research areas may include any combination of the natural and physical sciences, engineering, and the social sciences. Proposals that advance understanding of the human and behavioral aspects of climate change and/or clean energy challenges are encouraged. Educational activities should be integral to the project. Only high caliber research proposals that require international collaborations and show a clear potential for rapid scale-up and growth will be considered. Proposals that could be submitted to regular disciplinary and interdisciplinary programs at NSF will be returned without review.
Proposals must clearly and succinctly address the following requirements. Note that reviewers will be asked to comment on how well these points are addressed in the submitted proposals.
- What is the societal challenge of global importance to be addressed?
- What is the novel scientific challenge of the proposed research? How will the proposed project utilize inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary approaches and/or convergence approaches to address the science challenge?
- What is the proposed use-inspired nature of the research?
- Why is the international partnership required, who are the partners, what are their contributions and roles in the project?
- What is the role of multi-sector and multi-stakeholder partners included (including but not limited to academia, private sector, public sector, philanthropies, etc.) in the proposed PIRE project?
- How will diversity, equity and inclusion be integrated into the research and education effort?
- What is your vision and strategy for growth, scaling up and expanding the research beyond the PIRE project period?
Letters of Intent due 2/6/22
