Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams | 23 541

Opportunity Information: Apply for 23 541

The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems Division (ECCS), is soliciting proposals under the ASCENT program titled "Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams" (Funding Opportunity Number 23-541). The core purpose is to fund bold, fundamental engineering research that tackles complex systems and network-level challenges that are too large or too interconnected to be solved by a single investigator or a short, narrowly scoped project. ECCS is looking for work that advances engineering systems at nano, micro, and macro scales, especially where new devices, components, and underlying engineering principles can be integrated into real-world power, control, networking, communications, and cyber systems with measurable societal benefit.

The opportunity emphasizes transformative, enabling research that is strengthened by modern computation, synthesis, evaluation, and analysis methods. ECCS is explicitly interested in high-impact application domains such as healthcare, homeland security, disaster mitigation, telecommunications, energy systems, environmental monitoring, transportation, manufacturing, and other system-relevant areas. In addition, the solicitation highlights priority and emerging areas that ECCS supports, including 5G and beyond wireless and spectrum technologies, quantum information science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data. The expectation is not incremental progress within a single subfield, but research that can shift capabilities in engineering systems and networks and ultimately improve quality of life through disruptive technologies, methods, or substantial performance gains.

ASCENT is structured around interdisciplinary team science. Proposals must involve at least three collaborating principal investigators and co-PIs working as an integrated team, with a clear justification for why the problem requires coordinated expertise across disciplines rather than parallel, loosely connected tasks. ECCS wants to build a connected portfolio of projects that create synergies across its three major research clusters: Communications, Circuits, and Sensing-Systems (CCSS); Electronics, Photonics and Magnetic Devices (EPMD); and Energy, Power, Control, and Networks (EPCN). While a proposal must fit within at least one of these clusters, projects that span multiple clusters are strongly encouraged, especially where cross-cluster integration is essential to solving the systems challenge.

From a project design standpoint, proposals are expected to frame a fundamental research problem with a strong intellectual core and a credible pathway to significant societal impact. The solicitation also puts weight on execution: teams should provide a realistic timeline, explain how collaboration will happen in practice, and describe explicit mechanisms for frequent communication and ongoing assessment of progress toward goals. In other words, reviewers will be looking not only at the ambition of the research question, but also at whether the team has a workable plan for integrating efforts, sharing data and methods, and adapting based on results.

Funding is provided as a grant within NSF's science and technology research and development category (CFDA 47.041). Awards are intended to be up to four years in duration, with a total project budget between $1,000,000 and $1,500,000 (award ceiling $1.5M). NSF anticipated making about six awards under this competition. The original closing date listed for this cycle was April 19, 2023, and the solicitation notes that future ASCENT competitions are expected to continue if the NSF budget allows, though specific themes and priorities may change from year to year. Eligibility is listed broadly as "Others" with additional clarification referenced in the full eligibility text of the solicitation, so applicants typically need to consult the program document for precise institutional and investigator requirements.

Overall, this opportunity is aimed at engineering-led teams proposing high-risk, high-reward fundamental research that crosses boundaries between communications and sensing, electronics and photonics, and energy and control, with the explicit goal of producing new approaches to systems-level problems that matter in the real world.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.041.
• This funding opportunity was created on Dec 30, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Apr 19, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1,500,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 6 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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