ROSES25: F.17 Research Initiation Awards

The NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Research Initiation Awards (RIA) program aims to broaden the base of institutions involved in the SMD research and technology development ecosystem. The program has two principal objectives:

1) Enable investigators with no prior or recent Federal funding to pursue research at institutions that have not commonly proposed or applied to the SMD ecosystem to initiate activities that, over the course of a two-year period, will provide the foundation for a competitive, sustainable, and productive program of research.

2) Enable undergraduate students affiliated with the proposing investigator to perform cutting-edge research in an SMD-relevant field. Funding for undergraduate students is a required element of the proposed project.

An RIA award, including indirect costs, must not exceed $300,000 for a duration of 24 months.

Though the primary sponsor of this program element is SMD (assistance listing number: 43.001), SMD-relevant technology investigations may be considered for co-funding by the Space Technology Mission Directorate (assistance listing number: 43.012)

This opportunity is designed to support the executive order (EO) Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking. In particular: Section 4 (D) iv that “Discretionary grants should be given to a broad range of recipients rather than to a select group of repeat players” by excluding R1 institutions (see Section 2.1) and as specified in Section 4 (D) vii of that EO will “prioritize an institution’s commitment to rigorous, reproducible scholarship over its historical reputation or perceived prestige."

Moreover, per NASA’s implementation of Executive Order 14303, Restoring Gold Standard Science, this program element seeks science conducted in a manner that is: reproducible; transparent; communicative of error and uncertainty; collaborative and interdisciplinary; skeptical of its findings and assumptions; structured for falsifiability of hypotheses; accepting of negative results as positive outcomes. Proposals will be subject to unbiased peer review (see Section 4) without conflicts of interest.