Young Faculty Award | DARPA RA 18 02

Opportunity Information: Apply for DARPA RA 18 02

The DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) is a competitive federal grant program run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, specifically through DARPA's Defense Sciences Office. Its purpose is to identify and support rising academic researchers at an early career stage and bring them into closer contact with Department of Defense and broader national security problems. The program is designed not just to fund a single project, but to help develop a pipeline of future scientific and engineering leaders who will spend a meaningful part of their careers working on defense-relevant research and technology challenges.

At its core, the YFA provides high-impact funding to elite junior faculty so they can pursue bold, new research directions that could eventually enable transformative capabilities for the DoD. DARPA is looking for innovative ideas and strong technical potential, with an emphasis on research that opens up new avenues rather than incremental extensions of existing work. While the program is open to any qualified applicant with a compelling concept, DARPA explicitly notes interest in identifying excellent researchers who have not previously been performers on DARPA programs, reflecting the program's role as an entry point for new talent into the DARPA ecosystem.

Eligibility is tightly focused on early-career faculty or equivalent researchers at US institutions. Applicants must be current tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professors, or they may be tenured Assistant or Associate Professors as long as they are within three years of their tenure appointment. Eligible organizations include US institutions of higher education and US non-profit science and technology research institutions with equivalent positions. Foreign organizations are not eligible to submit proposals as primary applicants, although they may participate as part of a team in a subcontractor role, which allows specialized expertise or collaboration while keeping the primary award anchored in the United States. Importantly, previous YFA recipients are not allowed to apply again, either to this cycle or any future YFA program, ensuring the awards continue to rotate toward new early-career investigators.

From the opportunity details provided, this is a discretionary grant funding opportunity in the category of science and technology research and development (CFDA 12.910). The funding opportunity number is DARPA-RA-18-02, with an original closing date of November 13, 2018, and a maximum award amount (ceiling) of up to $1,000,000 per award. Overall, the program is best understood as DARPA's mechanism for rapidly empowering promising junior researchers to pursue ambitious, defense-relevant science and engineering concepts while simultaneously building long-term connections between those researchers and national security needs.

• The DARPA - Defense Sciences Office in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Young Faculty Award" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.910.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2018-08-09.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2018-11-13. (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 $1,000,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for DARPA RA 18 02

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