DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA)
Sponsor Deadline for Executive Summaries (strongly encouraged): October 26, 2020
FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: December 23, 2020
Sponsor Deadline for Full Proposals: January 8, 2021
Award Amount: Each award will include a 24-month base period (each 12-month interval of the base period shall not exceed $250,000 for a maximum of $500,000) and a 12-month option period (a maximum of $500,000 awarded as the “Director’s Fellowship,” reserved for a limited number of awardees who demonstrate exceptional YFA project performance over the 24-month base period).

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 DoD and National Security challenges and needs. In particular, 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. Participation is open to individuals who are U.S. Citizens, U.S. Permanent Residents, and Foreign Nationals who are current Tenure-Track Assistant/Associate Professors; or current Tenured faculty within 3 years of their Tenure date. DARPA is particularly interested in identifying outstanding researchers who have previously not been awardees on DARPA programs, but the program is open to all qualified applicants with innovative research ideas. Once awards are made, each YFA awardee 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.

DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the areas of interest to DARPA’s six technical offices: Biological Technologies Office (BTO), Defense Sciences Office (DSO), Information Innovation Office (I2O), Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), Strategic Technology Office (STO), and Tactical Technology Office (TTO). This RA solicits single PI proposals for research and development in the following specific Topic Areas (TAs) of interest:

1. Cutting the Cold Chain (C³)
2. Infectious Disease Detection of Individuals at Facility Ingress
3. Musculoskeletal Injury-associated Microbiomes
4. Spike Plus: Innovative Models of Neural Computation and Control
5. Developing a Molecular Strategy to Control Invasive Plant Species that Impede Logistics
6. Broadband, Efficient Upconversion with 2D Material Platforms
7. Analogical Decision Planning
8. Multifunctional Molecular Networks
9. Extreme Photon Sensing
10. Lessons in Asymmetric Adversarial Reasoning (LiAAR)
11. Analysis of Corporate Access, Ownership, and Control
12. A Unified Theoretical and Computational Framework for Narratives in Information Operations
13. Analyzing Differential Privacy Misuse
14. Effective Hardware Supported Monitoring of Software
15. Robot Adaptation as Living Creatures
16. Ferroelectric Material for FerroElectronic Devices
17. Ultra-Wide Bandgap Material and RF Device Technology
18. Electroluminescent-Based Coolers Approaching Carnot Limit
19. Topologically-enhanced Reconfigurable Optoelectronics
20. Materials and Interconnect Approaches for 3D Heterogeneous Integration for Millimeter Wave Arrays
21. Acoustic Sensing with Electro-momentum Coupling
22. Access to Networks with Machine Learning (ANML)
23. Lithography-free Integrated Photonics
24. Extension of Hypersonic Sonic Boom Theory to Include Lift Components
25. Unique Robotics Using Flexible Films with Embedded Actuators
26. Energy Web Dominance
27. Novel Methods for High-Rate, Short-Duration Force Measurement

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. The YFA Proposers Day was held on September 25, 2020 via webcast. DARPA will post the presentation at: http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities.