Environmental Engineering | PD 20 1440

Opportunity Information: Apply for PD 20 1440

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Environmental Engineering program (Funding Opportunity Number PD 20-1440) supports potentially transformative, fundamental research aimed at protecting human health and ecological systems. Housed within the Environmental Engineering and Sustainability cluster (alongside the Nanoscale Interactions and Environmental Sustainability programs), it funds interdisciplinary work that applies chemical, biological, and physical science and engineering principles to understand and control pollution in air, water, and soil. A central theme across the program is building a strong, mechanistic understanding of how pollutants move through the environment and how they undergo biogeochemical reactions, since that knowledge underpins effective prevention, mitigation, and remediation strategies.

The program is organized around three core objectives. First, it supports research that prevents, minimizes, or reuses solid, liquid, and gaseous discharges by closing resource loops or otherwise reducing pollution at the source, including approaches that reduce waste generation and enable circular use of resources. Second, it funds work that mitigates environmental and human-health impacts after releases occur, such as smart, adaptive, or reactive amendments and strategies that intentionally manipulate environmental conditions to reduce harm. Third, it supports remediation research that cleans up contaminated environments using engineered chemical, biological, and geophysical processes. Within these goals, research in environmental microbiology, environmental chemistry, and environmental geophysics can be a strong fit when it is clearly tied to protecting human and ecological health.

NSF highlights several major interest areas, while noting the list is not exhaustive. One area is building a future without pollution or waste, including studies of innovative biogeochemical processes that reduce waste production and research on waste valorization that can extract useful resources from waste streams to close the resource loop. Another major area is sustainable water supply and protection, including new biogeochemical processes that remove, transform, or prevent contaminants in surface and groundwater; technologies and approaches that recover water, nutrients, and other resources from wastewater, saline waters, or brines; and smart, adaptive management of surface waters, groundwater, stormwater, and urban watersheds to maintain or improve water quality and prevent downstream impacts from nutrients and other constituents. A third area is environmental chemistry, fate, and transport of nutrients and contaminants of emerging concern across air, water, soils, and sediments, including transport and reactivity studies, environmental forensics to identify sources and reaction pathways, and field- and lab-scale experiments designed to bridge gaps between molecular, continuum, and field-scale modeling and real-world observations. A fourth area focuses on the built environment, including understanding the biogeochemical reactivity of built systems to improve health outcomes, developing technologies that improve outdoor and indoor air quality, and studying how drinking water and wastewater chemistry and microbial community structure influence, or are influenced by, water quality and human health.

The solicitation also draws clear boundaries to help applicants route proposals to the right NSF program. Proposals primarily focused on chemical or physical separation processes (for example, reverse osmosis, membrane distillation, and related filtration concepts) are directed to the Interfacial Engineering program. Proposals centered on fundamental, quantitative understanding of nanomaterials and nanosystems behavior should go to the Nanoscale Interactions program. Proposals that are mainly in vitro, molecular-level environmental chemistry are better suited for the Environmental Chemical Sciences program. Work focused on industrial ecology, green engineering, or ecological and earth systems engineering should be submitted to the Environmental Sustainability program. Proposals that mainly emphasize materials development, sensors, or monitoring without digging into mechanisms of biogeochemical reactivity or treatment efficiency are discouraged and may be returned without review. Because NSF can return misaligned proposals without review, the program recommends that investigators contact the program director before submitting if there is any uncertainty or if the idea falls outside the explicitly listed interest areas.

From a proposal strategy standpoint, NSF emphasizes that submissions should clearly explain what is novel and potentially transformative relative to prior work, why the project advances engineering science, and what success could mean for societal and/or industrial impacts. At minimum, the novelty or transformative potential needs to be stated in the Project Summary. Awards for unsolicited proposals in the CBET directorate are typically up to three years. Budgets for single-investigator awards often support one graduate student (or equivalent) and up to one month of PI time per year, with larger budgets being more common for multi-investigator projects; unusually large budgets should be discussed with the program director in advance. The opportunity is open to eligible applicants without a fixed deadline (proposals are accepted anytime), and NSF encourages CAREER proposals (five-year duration; Engineering CAREER proposals are typically due in July). The program also entertains conference, workshop, and supplement requests, as well as RAPID and EAGER proposals and GOALI proposals (which connect fundamental research with translational outcomes), though RAPID, EAGER, and certain other requests require prior discussion with the program director. Finally, proposals must comply with the NSF Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG), and noncompliant submissions will be returned without review.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Environmental Engineering" 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 Sep 11, 2019.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Proposals accepted anytime. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 103 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

Apply for PD 20 1440

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