Funding Resources

Graduate and undergraduate students have the opportunity to participate in the laboratory’s research and development programs, initiate new areas of research, and establish a base for ongoing collaborations through NREL’s Research Participant Program (RPP).

The Hydrologic Sciences Program is a disciplinary program within the Division of Earth Sciences. Hydrologic science has a distinct focus on continental water processes at all scales, and the program supports research with a primary focus on these processes. The program supports fundamental research about water on and beneath the Earth’s surface, as well as relationships of water with material and living components of the environment. A major focus is the study of hydrologic processes (e.g., rainfall and runoff; infiltration and subsurface flow; evaporation and transpiration), as well as fluxes of water (e.g. in soils, aquifers, and streams). Many projects involve the study of hydrologic transport (e.g., of dissolved solutes, sediment), coupling of hydrological processes with other systems (e.g., ecosystem processes, geochemical cycles, food and energy systems, socio-ecological systems), or hydrologic responses to change (e.g., changes in land use, climate, or watershed management). Observational, experimental, theoretical, and modeling approaches are supported.

The Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) program supports fundamental and innovative research in the design, operation and management of civil infrastructure that contributes to creating smart, sustainable and resilient communities at local, national and international scales. This program focuses on civil infrastructure as a system in which interactions between spatially- and functionally- distributed components and intersystem connections exist. All critical civil infrastructure systems are of interest, including transportation, power, water, pipelines and others.

The CIS program encourages potentially disruptive ideas that will open new frontiers and significantly broaden and transform relevant research communities. The program particularly welcomes research that addresses novel system and service design, system integration, big data analytics, and socio-technological-infrastructure connections. The program values diverse theoretical, scientific, mathematical, or computational contributions from a broad set of disciplines.

While component-level, subject-matter knowledge may be crucial in many research efforts, the program does not support research with a primary contribution pertaining to individual infrastructure components such as materials, sensor technology, extreme event analysis, human factors, climate modeling, structural, geotechnical, hydrologic or environmental engineering.

The Geobiology and Low-Temperature Geochemistry Program supports research on geochemical processes in terrestrial Earth’s surface systems, as well as the interaction of geochemical and biological processes. Proposals may address field, laboratory, theoretical, or modeling studies of these processes and related mechanisms at all spatial and temporal scales. The Geobiology and Low-Temperature Geochemistry Program is interested in supporting transformational and cutting-edge research. The Program also supports the development of geochemical proxies and analytical techniques. The Program is highly interdisciplinary and interfaces with other programs within the Geosciences Directorate, and with programs across NSF, including in biology, chemistry, and engineering.

The HDBE (Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment) program supports convergent research on the interaction between human activities, the built environment, and natural hazards. The program focuses on the effects of hazards on populations and built environments, including critical infrastructure and physical/cyber spaces. Successful proposals should address all three elements (humans, disasters, and the built environment) and contribute to theories or insights applicable across scales and sectors. HDBE research aims to deepen understanding of human behaviors and inform risk management and adaptation strategies in the face of climate change and other hazards.

The program seeks research that advances foundational theories, methods, and data across disciplines such as engineering, social sciences, natural sciences, computing, and related fields. Interdisciplinary proposals are common and encouraged.

Methodological contributions to disaster research are also of interest, including translating engineering solutions to community or national scale investments, examining interactions between humans and the built environment during simultaneous hazards and pandemics, and handling sensitive data relevant to disasters.

Researchers are encouraged to utilize NSF’s investments in the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) for testing, modeling, training, data sharing, and analysis. The program particularly encourages research addressing social equity, vulnerability, and environmental justice.

Prospective proposers are encouraged to email a one-page project summary to the HDBE Program Officer before submitting a full proposal to determine if their research topic aligns with the program’s scope and if co-review is appropriate.

The Aeronomy Program supports research from the mesosphere to the outer reaches of the thermosphere and all regions of the Earth’s ionosphere. The Aeronomy Program seeks to understand phenomena of ionization, recombination, chemical reaction, photo emission, and the transport of energy, and momentum within and between these regions. The program also supports research into the coupling of this global system to the stratosphere below and magnetosphere above and the plasma physics of phenomena manifested in the coupled ionosphere-magnetosphere system, including the effects of high-power radio wave modification.

The Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Program aims to understand changes in the atmosphere over short and long time scales. CEDAR is consistent with the recommendations and goals of the NAS Decadal Survey “Solar and Space Physics: A Science for a Technological Society”. A primary goal of CEDAR is to explain how energy is transferred between atmospheric regions by combining a comprehensive observational program with theoretical and empirical modeling efforts. A data base of CEDAR observations is maintained for community use. The annual CEDAR Workshop attracts over 300 scientists including a large number of graduate students and as well as many international collaborators.

The BMMB (Biomechanics and Mechanobiology) program supports transformative research in engineering biomechanics and mechanobiology, focusing on the mechanical behavior of living systems. The program encourages interdisciplinary studies and considers biological tissues as self-designing smart materials. Proposals must include a clear biological and mechanics component and improve our understanding of the mechanical behavior of living systems. The program welcomes investigations at various scales, from molecules to organisms, and encourages translation of findings into engineering science. Feasibility studies involving human volunteers or animal subjects may be supported. Proposers are encouraged to contact the program director before submission.

The Environmental Sustainability program is part of the Environmental Engineering and Sustainability cluster together with 1) the Environmental Engineering program and 2) the Nanoscale Interactions program.

The goal of the Environmental Sustainability program is to promote sustainable engineered systems that support human well-being and that are also compatible with sustaining natural (environmental) systems. These systems provide ecological services vital for human survival. Research efforts supported by the program typically consider long time horizons and may incorporate contributions from the social sciences and ethics. The program supports engineering research that seeks to balance society’s need to provide ecological protection and maintain stable economic conditions.

The objective of the Environmental Engineering program at NSF is to support research on the prevention, minimization, mitigation, and/or remediation of environmental pollution to protect human and ecological health. To achieve this objective, the program has long funded research projects on the environmental fate, transport, mitigation, and remediation of contaminants of emerging national interest by researchers across the United States.

The CMMT (Condensed Matter and Materials Theory) program supports theoretical and computational materials research in various areas, including condensed matter physics, biomaterials, ceramics, electronic and photonic materials, metals and metallic nanostructures, polymers, and solid-state and materials chemistry. The program focuses on advancing conceptual understanding of materials and related phenomena, developing analytical and computational techniques, and applying predictive materials-specific theory, simulation, and modeling. Methods such as electronic structure calculations, quantum field theories, statistical mechanics, and molecular dynamics are employed in the research. The program encourages the exploration of new paradigms in materials research, including data-centric approaches utilizing data analytics and machine learning. The research spans multiple length scales and may involve workstations or high-performance computing. The emphasis is on obtaining fundamental insights into material properties, predicting new materials and states of matter, and exploring new phenomena. Recent areas of interest include correlated electron systems, topological phases, low-dimensional materials, nonequilibrium phenomena, nanostructured materials, sustainable materials, and research at the interfaces of materials with biological systems. CMMT welcomes transformative submissions at the forefront of theoretical, computational, and data-intensive materials research, including understanding emergent properties, developing predictive models, exploring new paradigms, fostering interdisciplinary research, harnessing machine learning, and developing new theoretical frameworks. Projects involving significant cyberinfrastructure development should be submitted through the Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (CDS&E) program.