The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) INSPIRE Program encourages investigators to submit bold and transformative proposals that might be at a disadvantage in the normal NSF review process. INSPIRE specifically seeks to:

  • Create new interdisciplinary opportunities that are not perceived to exist presently.
  • Attract unusually creative high-risk / high-reward interdisciplinary proposals.
  • Provide sufficient funding to pursue the novel idea beyond the exploratory stage.
  • Recognize and encourage innovative interdisciplinary research by unusually creative individual investigators, especially at early- to mid-career stages.
  • Designate no favored topics; be open to all NSF-supported areas of science, engineering, and education research.

INSPIRE provides three types of awards: Track 1, Track 2 and Director’s Awards. Track 1 awards must be interdisciplinary and potentially transformative. They generally support a single investigator or a small team, with a maximum award size is $1,000,000 and maximum duration of five years. Track 2 awards fund mid-scale research projects and can request budgets up to $3,000,000 over a duration of up to five years. Director’s Awards are prestigious individual awards of up to $1,500,000 to single-investigator proposals that present ideas for interdisciplinary advances with unusually strong, exciting transformative potential.

All three types of awards require letters of intent. The due dates are as follows:

  • Track 1: December 10, 2012 – March 29, 2013
  • Track 2: December 10, 2012 – February 20, 2013
  • Director’s Awards: Same as Track 1

For more information, see the link below:

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2013/nsf13518/nsf13518.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click