NSF Ideas Lab: Cracking the Olfactory Code
Preliminary Proposal Deadline (required): May 1, 2015 by 5pm, proposer’s local time; OSP deadline: April 24, 2015
Full Proposal Deadline (by invitation): July 31, 2015 by 5pm proposer’s local time; OSP deadline: July 24, 2015
Award Amount: Between 2 and 3 awards will be made to interdisciplinary teams in each of FY 2015 and FY 2016 pending availability of funds and the type, scale, and variety of project ideas developed at the Ideas Lab. $12-$16M in funding is available in 2015-2016.
Target Disciplines: Traditional neuroscience disciplines, as well as physics, mathematical modeling, statistics, chemistry, engineering, computer science or any other discipline suited to shed light on the topic

This solicitation invites preliminary proposals for participation in an Ideas Lab on “Cracking the Olfactory Code.”  Ideas Labs are intensive workshops focused on finding innovative solutions to grand challenge problems.  The key objective of this Ideas Lab is to bring together researchers from diverse scientific backgrounds in order to engender fresh thinking and new approaches that answer fundamental questions in olfactory processing in the brain, including but not limited to:

• How does the olfactory system encode complex, naturalistic stimuli?
• How are olfactory representations modified by behavioral state and on-going activity of the organism?
• How do innate and learned odor valence influence olfactory processing, and how do they become integrated in olfactory representations?
• How do performance limits of the system, such as resolution of natural odor "scenes" and detection across concentration fluctuations due to environmental variations, shape olfactory representations?

Researchers will be expected to form new “teams” at the Ideas Lab, and those teams may then be invited to submit a full proposal at the end of the workshop.