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A Message from NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate
Dear Colleagues,
The U.S. National Science Foundation serves the American public as an engine of our nation's research enterprise. NSF's mission is the same today as it was in 1950: to advance the progress of science and enable better quality of life, greater economic opportunities and stronger national security.
Today, NSF is continuing to invest in bold research and innovation in service to the American people.
To help keep America at the forefront of science, engineering and technology, NSF is making changes to our organizational structure and merit review processes. These changes are designed to increase our agency's efficiency and effectiveness by reducing administrative burdens both inside the agency and externally, while maintaining our strong commitment to scientific rigor.
The Directorate of Biological Sciences (NSF BIO) has taken advantage of the reorganization as an opportunity to organize our proposal review on cross-cutting thematic areas: Foundations of Life, Living Systems, and Bioinnovation & Infrastructure. This offers advantages by leveraging the existing cross-disciplinary overlaps among many of our traditional programs and creating agile structures and processes to serve both the science of today and the science of the future.
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Foundations of Life: Exploring molecules, cells & physiology that build living things
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Living Systems: Understanding how species evolve, interact, and shape Earth’s ecosystems
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Bioinnovation & Infrastructure: Developing the tools, data, technologies and infrastructure to support biological sciences research
At the moment, please continue to submit proposals to current solicitations and programs. Please note that NSF BIO remains committed to all areas of biology. NSF BIO will continue to support interdisciplinary efforts, including quantum information science, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. The reorganization will empower our staff to seize emergent opportunities and enable more rapid engagement with both the U.S. research community and NSF leadership.
The changes to NSF's proposal review processes maintain our existing merit review criteria (Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts), while providing our program officers with new flexibilities to help them support and respond to the specific needs of their scientific disciplines. The goal is to reduce the workload of our program staff and increase our responsiveness agency-wide — so researchers can spend more time on research and collaboration and less on compliance and paperwork.
In the coming months, additional information will be communicated and posted on NSF's website as these organizational changes and processes take effect.
America's science and technology ecosystem is built on a remarkably successful partnership among government, academia, industry and nonprofits. Together, we will continue to foster discoveries, support the next generation of researchers and deliver innovations that benefit all Americans.
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Susan Marqusee
NSF Assistant Director,
Biological Sciences
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Theresa Good
NSF Directorate Head,
Biological Sciences
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