DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA): Deadline for Executive Summaries

DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA)
Sponsor Deadline for Executive Summaries (strongly encouraged): September 18, 2019
FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: November 12, 2019
Sponsor Deadline for Full Proposals: November 19, 2019
Award Amount: Each award will include a 24-month base period (maximum of $500,000) and a possible 12-month option period called the “Director’s Fellowship” (maximum of $500,000).

DARPA’s 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. Once awards are made, each YFA performer will be assigned a DARPA Program Manager with interests closely related to their research topic. The Program Manager will act as project manager and mentor to the YFA award recipients. As part of the program, a number of visits/exercises at a variety of DoD sites and facilities will be scheduled.

Participation in the YFA program is limited to any current tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professors and to tenured Assistant or Associate Professors within three years of their tenure appointment at a U.S. institution of higher education or equivalent at a U.S. non-profit science and technology research institution. Previous YFA recipients are not eligible to apply to this or any future YFA program, though recipients of non-YFA DARPA awards are eligible to propose.

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

1. Unlocking the Secrets of Roman Concrete
2. In Vivo Biosensors
3. Decision Making Algorithm for Medical Countermeasure (MCM) Development
4. Microbial Community Modeling
5. Biological Systems for Sensing, Reporting, and Mitigating Air Contamination
6. Distributed Intelligence in Flexible Robots
7. Bioinspired Soft-Matter Electrical Circuits
8. Room-temperature Chip-scale Quantum Opto-mechanical Sensors
9. AI System Engineering
10. Advanced Corrosion Control
11. Economics-driven Secure Multiparty Computation
12. Cross-Cultural Extrapolation of Privacy-Oriented Human-Technology Interactions
13. Scientific Model Aware Computing
14. Push Science
15. Visualization Innovations for Cyber Terrain Operations Representation (VICTOR)
16. Reducing Errors in Quantum Systems
17. Dielectrics for High-Temperature CMOS FETs
18. A Physics-Based Re-exploration of Spectrum Allocation
19. Detecting Cognitive Dissonance & Belief Shift Over Time
20. Chip-scale Blind Sampled Wideband Periodogram and Time Transfer by Machine Learning
21. Practical Antineutrino Detectors
22. RF Power Harvesting for Remote Sensing
23. Low Loop Latency Distributed Time Transfer
24. High-Entropy Alloys Study
25. Ocean Object Identification via Distributed Sensors
26. Flame Stability and Ignition in Partially-Premixed High-Speed Flows
27. On-Orbit Servicing Architectures for Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Constellations

At the executive summary phase, proposing PIs are limited to one executive summary per TA. At the full proposal phase, proposing PIs are limited to submitting only one full proposal to only one topic under this RA.