Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure

This program seeks to prepare, nurture, and grow the national scientific research workforce for creating, utilizing, and supporting advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) to enable and potentially transform fundamental science and engineering (S&E) research and education and contribute to the Nation's overall economic competitiveness and security. The goals of this solicitation are to (i) ensure broad adoption of CI tools, methods, and resources by the research community in order to catalyze major research advances and to enhance researchers’ abilities to lead the development of new CI, and (ii) integrate core literacy and discipline-appropriate advanced skills in advanced CI as well as computational and data-driven methods for advancing fundamental research, into the Nation’s undergraduate and graduate educational curriculum/instructional materials. Proposals responding to this solicitation may target one or both solicitation goals. For the purpose of this solicitation, advanced CI is broadly defined as the set of resources, tools, methods, and services for advanced computation, large-scale data handling and analytics, and networking and security for large-scale systems that collectively enable potentially transformative fundamental S&E research and education. This solicitation calls for innovative, scalable training, education, and curriculum/instructional materials—targeting one or more of the solicitation goals—to address emerging needs and unresolved bottlenecks in the S&E research workforce development, from the postsecondary level to active researchers to CI professionals. The funded activities, spanning targeted, multidisciplinary communities, should lead to transformative changes in the state of research workforce preparedness for advanced CI-enabled research in the short- and long-term. This solicitation also seeks to broaden CI access and adoption by (i) increasing the adoption of advanced CI and computational and data-driven methods to a broader range of S&E disciplines and institutions and (ii) effectively utilizing individual capabilities. Proposals from, and in partnership with, the aforementioned communities are especially encouraged. There are two project classes as defined below: • Pilot Projects: up to $300,000 total budget with durations up to two years; and • Implementation Projects: Small (with total budgets of up to $500,000) or...

*Who May Serve as PI: To ensure relevance to community needs and to facilitate adoption, those proposals of interest to one or more domain divisions must include at least one PI/co-PI with expertise relevant to the targeted research discipline. All proposals shall include at least one PI/co-PI with expertise relevant to OAC.