DARPA Young Faculty Award Deadline

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA)Sponsor Deadline for Executive Summaries (strongly encouraged): October 2, 2017OSP Deadline: November 27, 2017Sponsor Deadline for Full Proposals: December 4, 2017Award Amount: Each award will include a 24-month base period (a maximum of $500,000) and a 12-month option period (a maximum of $500,000). The 12-month option period, referred to as the “Director’s Fellowship,” will be reserved for a limited number of awardees who demonstrate exceptional YFA project performance over the 24-month base period. Multiple awards are anticipated.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA) program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior faculty positions in academia and equivalent positions at non-profit research institutions and expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) and National Security challenges and needs. In particular, this YFA will provide high-impact funding to elite researchers early in their careers to develop innovative new research directions in the context of enabling transformative DoD capabilities. The long-term goal of the program is to develop the next generation of scientists and engineers in the research community who will focus a significant portion of their future careers on DoD and National Security issues. DARPA is particularly interested in identifying outstanding researchers who have previously not been performers on DARPA programs, but the program is open to all qualified applicants with innovative research ideas.

Participation is open to individuals who are U.S. Citizens, U.S. Permanent Residents, and Foreign Nationals. Proposers must be one of the following (excluding any personal leaves of absence) at a U.S.-based institution by the full proposal deadline:

• current Tenure-Track Assistant/Associate Professors;
• current Tenured faculty within 3 years of their Tenure date; or
• an equivalent at a non-profit research institution within 12 years of the receipt of their Ph.D.

This Research Announcement solicits single principal investigator (PI) proposals for research and development in the following specific Technical Areas of interest:

• Designing Ungameably Complex Games
• Topological Photonics
• Artificial Intelligence for Materials Discovery
• Transformative Radiation Sensing
• Engineered Interactions with the Energy of the Vacuum
• Novel Methods for Nonsurgical Brain Interfaces
• Self-forming Chronic Central Nervous System (CNS) Neural Interfaces
• The Minimal Plant: Engineering Plants for Easy Biosynthetic Pathway Design with High Modularity
• Antifouling Solutions for Large, Nonplanar Optical Surfaces
• Replicating Cell-Cell Information Transfer
• Programmable DNA Repair for Improved Genome Editing Outcomes
• Efficient Integrated Nanophotonics
• Adversarial Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Developing Intelligent Sensors for Fentanyl and Related Toxins
• High Quality Atomic Traps and Waveguides
• Wideband Efficiency in Millimeter Wave Power Amplifiers
• Materials and Actuator Innovation for Small Scale Mobility and Manipulation
• Reducing Software Attack Surface through Compiler-Rewriter Cooperation
• Computational Models of the Spread of False or Misleading Information
• Big Data Summarization
• Decentralized Control of Networked Unmanned Autonomous Systems
• REsilience through COmposable Logistics (RECOiL)
• Wide Area Sensing Using the Internet of Things
• Tactical Terrain Analysis
• Thermostructural Sensitivity to Uncertainties
• Swarm Intent Understanding