ORN-2024-20 | Research (2024)

Special Announcements:

ARPA-H Funding Programs Pursuing Health Breakthroughs

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) provides research funding to build high-payoff capabilities or platforms to drive biomedical breakthroughs – ranging from the molecular to societal – that will provide transformative solutions for all individuals. The focus areas below illustrate the types of work and impact that ARPA-H may pursue as it hires its first Program Managers. Focus areas include:

Health Science Futures - Expanding what’s technically possible: Accelerating advances across research areas and removing limitations that stymie progress towards solutions. The tools and platforms developed apply to a broad range of diseases.

Scalable Solutions - Reaching everyone quickly: Addressing challenges that include geography, distribution, manufacturing, data and information, and economies of scale to create programs that result in impactful, timely, and equitable solutions.

Proactive Health - Keeping people from being patients: Reducing the likelihood that people become patients. Preventative programs will create new capabilities to detect and characterize disease risk and promote treatments and behaviors to anticipate threats to Americans’ health, whether those are viral, bacterial, chemical, physical, or psychological.

Resilient Systems - Building integrated health care systems: Developing capabilities, business models, and integrations to endure crises such as pandemics, social disruption, and economic instability. Resilient systems need to sustain themselves between crises – from the molecular to the societal – to better achieve outcomes that advance American health and wellbeing.

The ARPA-H Customer Experience (CX) Hub recently announced a network surveyforsafe and secure biotechnology platformsthat will support the development of a toolkitforthe ARPA-HAPECx program. The CX Hub is initiating this approach with a network survey.Toreview their request and provide feedback on the effort, please review the surveyherebyMay 17.Membership is not required. 

TheARPA-H APECx Programaimstodevelop a toolkitforprecise chimeric and broadly efficacious vaccine antigen discovery. The toolkits will leverage information that’s developed through the APECx program, such as data from high-throughput functional analysis, novel method development, and the creation of novel protein modeling and design tools,toinclude AI/ML-enabled methods. This AI/ML-centric, data intensive program will enable the development of predictive de novo design toolsforproteins and the abilitytoprogram antigensforspecific immune system interactions. 

Learn more about the network surveyforsafe and secure biotechnology platformshere.

Learn more about the CX Hubhere.

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INCITE PROGRAM

Leading the Way in Scientific Computing

TheUS Department of Energy(DOE)Office of Scienceprovides a portfolio of national high-performance computing facilities housing some of the world’s most advanced supercomputers. These leadership computing facilities enable world-class research for significant advances in science. Open to researchers from academia, government laboratories, and industry, the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is the major means by which the scientific community gains access to the nation’s fastest supercomputers. The program aims to accelerate scientific discoveries and technological innovations by awarding, on a competitive basis, time on supercomputers to researchers with large-scale, computationally intensive projects that address “grand challenges” in science and engineering. New INCITE proposals are accepted between mid-April and June 14, 2024.

Proposal authors are encouraged to consider applying for access to the systems in order to carry out porting, tuning, and benchmarking in preparation for an INCITE submittal. Requests for small awards of time (typically less than 75,000 node-hours) can be requested throughout the year from the Director’s Discretionary Program.Contact Usfor more details.

Director’s Discretionary Programs

ANL:https://www.alcf.anl.gov/science/directors-discretionary-allocation-program

ORNL:https://my.olcf.ornl.gov/project-application-new

Grant Opportunity Alerts:

NSF: Advanced Computing Systems & Services: Adapting to the Rapid Evolution of Science and Engineering Research; Research Training Groups in the Mathematical Sciences; Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence; Molecular Foundations for Sustainability: Sustainable Polymers Enabled by Emerging Data Analytics (MFS-SPEED)

NIH: Mentored Career Development Award to Promote Faculty Diversity in Biomedical Research (K01); Independent Scientist Award (Parent K02)

Department of Defense/US Army/DARPA/ONR: Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) Office-wide; DOD duch*enne Muscular Dystrophy, Idea Development Award; 2024 National Science Portal (NSP); Funding Opportunity Announcement ONR STEM Program; Office of Naval Research Science and Technology for Advanced Manufacturing Projects (STAMP)

Department of Commerce/EDA: FY2024 CHIPS Manufacturing USA Institute Competition

Department of Energy: Quantum Information Science Enabled Discovery (QuantISED 2.0); Photovoltaics Research and Development (PVRD) FOA 2024; Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) – Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Communities Taking Charge Accelerator, Fiscal Year 2024 Funding Opportunity Announcement

National Endowment of Humanities: Public Humanities Projects

Recent Research Grant and Contract Awards:

In the News:

White House launches digital twins funding opportunity: The White House debuted a new funding opportunity as part of an ongoing effort to spur domestic semiconductor manufacturing and decrease reliance on foreign technology supply chains. Announced on Monday,the $285 million funding opportunityis seeking proposals from eligible applicants to help establish and operate a CHIPS Manufacturing USA Institute, with a specific focus on digital twins for the semiconductor industry. Digital twinsare virtual copies of physical technologies or systems that can provide insights and visualizations into how the real-world technology functions. These twins can leverage technologies like artificial intelligence to provide efficient ways to analyze and understand the systems they are simulating.More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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House bill targets AI-generated comments in rulemaking: The House passed a bill on Monday that tasks federal agencies with managing computer-generated comments in rulemaking proceedings. TheComment Integrity and Management Act of 2024passed without opposition on a voice vote. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., doesn't look to block comments generated by large language models like ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and others. Rather, the bill puts a legislative framework around existing efforts to identify and manage the flow of computer-generated comments to proceedings on Regulations.gov and elsewhere. "The cornerstone of this bill is its commitment to ensuring that every comment submitted by electronic means comes from a real person, not an automated program," Higgins said on the House floor on Monday. "By requiring human verification, we are taking a significant step towards preserving the authenticity of public input." More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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NVIDIA and MITRE team up on an AI sandbox to support federal agency research: NVIDIA is bringing advanced computing capabilities to federal partners with the installation of the company’s DGX SuperPOD, which leverages hardware and software specific to hosting artificial intelligence systems in a bid to advance federal research. In a collaboration between chip manufacturer NVIDIA and not-for-profit research corporation MITRE, the former’s DGX SuperPOD — an AI-specific data center platform composed of up to 32 interconnected nodes and a total of 256 graphics processing units — will be installed physically at MITRE’s Mclean location, but the broader virtual sandbox the collaboration fosters will be hosted digitally in the cloud. Bringing federal agencies broad access to sophisticated AI technologies is the heart of the partnership, according to Anthony Robbins, vice president of North American public sector business at NVIDIA. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

Webinars and Events: