Dear NSF CHE Community,

We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Judith Burstyn as the division director for the NSF Division of Chemistry. Burstyn will join us in January 2025. Please see our "Staff updates" section to learn more about her.

NSF CHE congratulates the laureates of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry, David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper, for their work on the design and prediction of proteins. CHE is proud to have supported Baker through multiple research and infrastructure grants. Baker was also supported by funding from the NSF directorates for Biological Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; and Technology, Innovation and Partnerships.

The next two months bring deadlines on several cross-NSF programs that we support, including those focusing on the use of plasma science to detect or remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) substances from the environment, the use of emerging data analytics to discover and develop new polymers and the use of quantum information science to advance chemical research. You can find more information about these funding calls in the links provided below.

We also want to highlight the NSF Game Maker Awards competition, which is an exciting opportunity for students in grades K-12 to showcase their creativity, technical skills and passion for game design. This competition is part of NSF's 75th anniversary celebrations. Please see the link below for more information. 

We had a great time interacting with the community at two regional American Chemical Society meetings this past month: the Midwest Regional Meeting and the Southeastern Regional Meeting. As we wind down the calendar year, we have one office hour left. Please join us in December to hear about the Environmental Chemical Sciences program and get your questions answered.

Best,

Lin He
Acting Division Director
NSF Division of Chemistry

Staff updates

Judith Burstyn will join CHE as its division director in January 2025. Judith comes to NSF from her position as a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Chemistry. From 2017 to 2021, she was the Irving Shain Chair in Chemistry and the department chair. She is an accomplished researcher in the field of biological inorganic chemistry and a prolific supervisor of 30 doctoral students. Judith has been recognized with several awards and fellowships, including selection as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. She has served in several roles in service to the chemistry community, including as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Chemical Society Journal Inorganic Chemistry and as chair of the Gordon Research Conference on the Chemistry and Biology of Tetrapyrroles. She has played an active role in promoting women in chemistry and STEM in general.

We congratulate John Gilje on his retirement from NSF after 30-plus years of exceptional service to the chemistry community. Since joining CHE in 1993, he has served as both a rotating program director and later a part-time expert in several programs, including the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program, the Chemistry of Life Processes program, the Chemical Catalysis program, and more recently the Chemical Synthesis program. John is a professor emeritus at James Madison University, where he has built an internationally recognized program in transition metal inorganic, organometallic, and main group chemistry. He is also a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii – Manoa.  We thank John for his 30-plus years of service and wish him a happy retirement!

📢Important update: Multifactor Authentication Implementation

Dear Colleague Letter: Multifactor Authentication Implementation for Research.gov

As part of our ongoing commitment to enhancing security and safeguarding NSF's IT systems, user accounts, personal and scientific data, and the integrity of the merit review process, effective Oct. 27, 2024, NSF is implementing multifactor authentication for Research.gov. This implementation may affect your current access to Research.gov as a principal investigator, a panelist, and/or a reviewer. See DCL for more information.

NSF Game Maker Awards

About the competition

The NSF Game Maker Awards for grades K-12 commemorate NSF's 75th anniversary by engaging students in a video game design competition.

The competition aims to make STEM subjects exciting and accessible, encouraging students to imagine life in the year 2100 and the role science and technology will play in shaping the future.

Why should I enter?

Entrants will have the chance to win prizes, gain recognition and explore the fascinating world of science, technology, engineering and mathematics while developing a video game.

Information about the awards, eligibility and due dates can be found at NSF Game Maker Awards. 

📢 Announcements and funding opportunities

Dear Colleague Letter: ECosystem for Leading Innovation in Plasma Science and Engineering (ECLIPSE): Special Focus on PFAS and Microelectronics

NSF encourages interdisciplinary proposal submissions that capitalize on opportunities for bringing fundamental plasma science and engineering investigations to bear on two focus areas of societal and technological need:

1. The removal of PFAS from the environment.
2. Novel and more efficient methods for fabrication of microelectronics.

Proposal deadline: Nov. 18, 2024, by 5 p.m. submitting organization's local time.

Molecular Foundations for Sustainability: Sustainable Polymers Enabled by Emerging Data Analytics (MFS-SPEED)

MFS-SPEED supports cross-disciplinary, collaborative research focused on the discovery and ultimate manufacturing of new sustainable polymers or sustainable pathways to existing polymers using state-of-the-art data science.

Letter of intent (required) due: Dec. 5, 2024, due by 5 p.m. submitting organization's local time.

Molecular Foundations for Biotechnology (MFB): Partnerships to Transform Emerging Industries - RNA Tools/Biotechnology

This MFB solicitation calls for creative, cross-disciplinary research and technology development proposals to accelerate the understanding of RNA function in complex biological systems and to harness RNA research to advance biotechnology.

The funding opportunity will be coordinated by the NSF together with the National Institutes of Health National Human Genome Research Institute. 

Proposal deadline: Dec. 16, 2024, by 5 p.m. submitting organization's local time.

NSF Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1

The NSF Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 opportunity is intended to provide NSF with an agile, agency-wide process to fund experimental research capabilities in the mid-scale range between the NSF Major Research Instrumentation and Major Multi-user Facilities programs.

Preliminary proposal deadline: Nov. 18, 2024, by 5 p.m. submitting organization's local time. Full proposal by invitation only; due March 19, 2025, by 5 p.m. submitting organization's local time.

Dear Colleague Letter: NSF-UKRI/EPSRC Lead Agency Opportunity on Understanding and Exploiting Quantum Information in Chemical Systems

The NSF-UK Research and Innovation memorandum of understanding provides an overarching framework to encourage collaboration between U.S. and U.K. research communities and sets out the principles by which jointly supported activities might be developed. The scope of this opportunity is for U.S.-U.K. collaborative research proposals that advance the fundamental understanding of quantum information science concepts in the context of chemical systems or that leverage these concepts to advance chemistry research.

Expression of interest (EOI) deadline: EOI Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis, with the submission window closing in late November 2024. See the UKRI funding opportunity for exact deadlines.

Full proposal deadline: Invitations to submit full proposals will be made no later than early December 2024. The deadline for full proposal submission is expected to be in February 2025.

Dear Colleague Letter: Request for Information on the CHIPS and Science Act Section 10343. Research Ethics

NSF seeks input on ways to incorporate ethical, social, safety and security considerations into the agency's merit review process and to develop strategies for mitigating the potential harms of scientific research and amplifying societal benefits from such research. To respond to this request for information, please use the official submission form.

Response deadline: 11:59 p.m. EST, Dec. 13, 2024.

📅 Upcoming events

NSF Environmental Chemical Sciences (NSF ECS) Office Hour Join to learn more about the NSF ECS program's portfolio and funding opportunities and to get answers to your questions about the program. When: Friday, Dec. 6 at 3 p.m. EST.

📰 News from our awardees

Credit: Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach

NSF congratulates laureates of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry

The U.S. National Science Foundation congratulates David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper on being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Baker and his colleagues revolutionized protein design enabling the creation of protein structures never seen in nature, many of which have potential as therapeutics or treatments, new materials or in other applications. Hassabis and Jumper similarly revolutionized protein prediction with the creation of AlphaFold software, enabling the determination of a protein's structure from its amino acid sequence alone. NSF is immensely proud of the decades of fundamental research support and infrastructure investments that led to these advances.

Opinions, findings or recommendations of NSF awardees or their institutions do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

CHE People

Broadening Participation in Chemistry

• Anne-Marie Schmoltner
• Samy El-Shall
• Pumtiwitt McCarthy

Centers for Chemical Innovation 

• Katharine Covert
• Greg Collins
• Colby Foss

Chemical Catalysis

• Kenneth Moloy
• Gregory Dudley
• Tong Ren

Chemical Measurement and Imaging

• Kelsey Cook
• José Almirall
• Greg Collins

Chemical Mechanisms, Function and Properties

• Tingyu Li
• Gregory Dudley
• Richard Johnson

Chemical Structure and Dynamics 

• John Papanikolas
• Samy El-Shall
• Ryan Jorn

Chemical Synthesis 

• Sarah Wengryniuk
• Laura Anderson
• George Richter-Addo

Chemical Theory, Models, and Computational Methods 

• Richard Dawes
• Ryan Jorn

Chemistry of Life Processes

• Pumtiwitt McCarthy
• P. Shing Ho
• John Jewett

Chemistry Research Experiences of Undergraduate Sites 

• Tomislav Pintauer
• Margaret Capooci

Environmental Chemical Sciences 

• Anne-Marie Schmoltner
• Margaret Capooci
• Tingyu Li

Macromolecular, Supramolecular, and Nanochemistry 

• Suk-Wah Tam-Chang
• Stephen Boyes
• Colby Foss
• Tomislav Pintauer

Major Research Instrumentation 

• Tanya Whitmer
• Michael Greenlief

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