Synthesis Center for Understanding Organismal Resilience | 23 564

Opportunity Information: Apply for 23 564

The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) and the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS), is soliciting proposals to establish a new Synthesis Center focused on understanding organismal resilience and plasticity. In NSF terms, a synthesis center is designed to bring researchers together to make major advances by integrating and reanalyzing existing datasets rather than primarily generating brand-new data. The goal here is to accelerate discovery by combining disparate kinds of biological information, building shared infrastructure and expertise, and creating an environment where collaborative teams can tackle questions that are too large or complex for single labs to address effectively.

Scientifically, the center is expected to improve our ability to explain and predict how organisms cope with, adjust to, and remain functional under complex and changing environmental conditions across their lifespans. IOS emphasizes organisms as integrated units, meaning the center should support work that connects how organisms are built (structure, development) with how they operate (function, physiology, behavior) and how they respond to stressors or shifting conditions. The opportunity explicitly encourages synthesis that bridges multiple biological scales and levels of organization, potentially integrating genomic data with physiological, structural, developmental, behavioral, neural, immunological, and microbiological information, among others, across IOS-relevant subdisciplines. The expectation is that pulling these data together will produce new conceptual insights, improved predictive frameworks, and stronger cross-cutting understanding of resilience and plasticity in real-world, dynamic environments.

Methodologically and culturally, NSF is signaling that this center should be built around open science, team science, and data-intensive approaches. That means the center should enable broad data sharing and reuse, develop or apply modern computational and analytical methods for synthesis, and create inclusive collaboration models that welcome participation across disciplines and institution types. Beyond research outputs, the center is also expected to function as a training engine, preparing new generations of scientists to solve hard problems using collaborative, cross-disciplinary, data-driven, and openly accessible practices. In other words, it is not only about producing findings, but also about building community capacity, raising the standard for reproducible and reusable synthesis science, and modeling effective ways to engage a diverse and distributed scientific workforce.

In terms of impact, NSF anticipates that the resulting syntheses will lead to fundamental discoveries and may also support translational or use-inspired research directions, even though the core emphasis is on advancing basic understanding. By creating a shared hub that lowers barriers to integrating complex datasets and coordinating expertise, the center is intended to have outsized influence on organismal biology and on how the broader community studies resilience and adaptation in the face of environmental change.

Eligibility is limited to U.S.-based institutions that can host and operate a center at this scale. Proposals may be submitted by U.S. Institutions of Higher Education (including accredited two- and four-year colleges and community colleges with a U.S. campus) acting on behalf of faculty members, as well as non-profit, non-academic organizations such as independent museums, observatories, research laboratories, professional societies, and similar U.S.-located organizations directly tied to education or research. If a proposal includes funding that would flow to an international branch campus of a U.S. institution (including via subawards or consulting), the proposal must clearly explain why work at that branch campus is beneficial to the project and why the activities cannot be performed at the U.S. campus.

Key opportunity details from the notice include: the agency is NSF; the funding instrument is a grant; the activity category is science and technology and other research and development; the opportunity number is 23-564; the CFDA number is 47.074; the original closing date listed is 2024-07-15; and the opportunity was created on 2023-03-21. The notice does not provide an award ceiling or expected number of awards in the included excerpt, implying applicants would need to consult the full solicitation for budget scale, project duration, and any additional submission requirements or review criteria.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Synthesis Center for Understanding Organismal Resilience" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.074.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2023-03-21.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-07-15. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for 23 564

[Watch] Creating a grant proposal using the step-by-step wizard inside the applicant portal: