NJIT Research Newsletter includes recent awards, and announcements of research related seminars, webinars, national and federal research news related to research funding, and Grant Opportunity Alerts (with links to sections). The Newsletter is posted on the NJIT Research Website https://research.njit.edu/funding-opportunities.
NEH Announces Reorganization of its Grantmaking Offices, Programs, and Personnel
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced an agency-wide reorganization to consolidate its grantmaking programs and divisions. NEH will merge the functions and staff of seven grantmaking offices and divisions into four new divisions to support projects that advance humanities research, education, public programs, infrastructure, and cultural preservation.
Effective immediately, NEH’s new divisions will be:
Division of Federal/State Partnership
NEH’s Division of Federal/State Partnership is charged with carrying out the Congressional mandate of establishing and maintaining humanities councils in the 56 states and U.S. jurisdictions and coordinating the partnership between NEH and the councils. The Division is responsible for administration and oversight of statutory federal operating support funding for the 56 humanities councils and managing collaborative projects and initiatives between NEH and the nonprofit state and local humanities councils.
Division of Collections & Infrastructure
NEH’s Division of Collections & Infrastructure makes grants to organizations that seek to address the physical deterioration of their humanities collections as well as to provide access to them, including through the latest digital and other technologies. The Division’s programs focus on the twin goals of ensuring the long-term and the wide availability of primary resources in the humanities for scholars, teachers, students, and the public. The Division also supports the nation’s humanities infrastructure through “challenge” programs that enable humanities organizations to strengthen their financial stability. Challenge awards typically require the recipient to raise one to four dollars in new donations from non-federal sources for each federal dollar received.
Division of Lifelong Learning
NEH’s Division of Lifelong Learning provides humanities programming for the public as well as humanities programming geared towards the K-12 and postsecondary education sectors. The Division supports humanities projects in museums, historical and cultural organizations, libraries, K-12 classrooms, and colleges and universities, as well as for television, radio, and digital media. By developing quality humanities programs that foster public engagement in and appreciation for the humanities, the Division of Lifelong Learning delivers the best in the humanities for all Americans.
Division of Research
NEH’s Division of Research supports advanced humanities research by making grants to scholars, teachers and writers, and to educational and research organizations. These grants support individuals and collaborative teams of scholars and researchers in exploring archives, interpreting humanities texts and materials, developing and using digital tools, discovering new knowledge or rediscovering truths. The Division of Research also supports the humanities by commissioning studies on the state of the humanities to assess Americans’ engagement with the humanities and monitor trends within individual fields of study.
National Endowment for the Humanities: The National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at neh.gov.
NSF: NSF STEM K-12 (STEM K-12); Computer and Information Science and Engineering: Future Computing Research (Future CoRe); Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science (SCH)
NIH: Forecast: NIH Director’s Early Independence Awards (DP5); Forecast: Advancing Bioinformatics, Translational Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Research (R01)
Department of Defense/US Army/DARPA/ONR: US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Broad Agency Announcement; Air Force Fiscal Year 2026 Young Investigator Program (YIP)
Department of Energy: Request for Information: Energy Critical Materials Assessment
NASA: ROSES 2025: B.4 Space Weather Science Application Research-to-Operations-to-Research
What’s powering the next wave of government AI: Recent federal initiatives, including the White House’s “AI Action Plan,” underscore the urgency of accelerating AI adoption across government. While the policy lays the foundation, open source technology is already overcoming the biggest barriers, offering scalable, efficient and more secure tools that agencies can deploy today. Open source AI: Accelerating government adoption A key aspect of this pillar is the call to “Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI,” a philosophy that aligns with Red Hat's views on open source AI. The White House action plan states that “Open-source and open-weight AI models are made freely available by developers for anyone in the world to download and modify,” offering significant value to startups, businesses and governments by reducing their reliance on large cloud providers. More information is posted on the NextGov website.
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Microsoft announces plan to transition to quantum resilience by 2033: Microsoft is looking to finalize the transition of its products to a post-quantum cryptographic standard by 2033, two years before the 2035 deadline the Biden administration previously recommended to mitigate “as much of the quantum risk as is feasible,” per a 2022 OMB memo. Microsoft outlined its approach in a new transition plan released on Wednesday and said it aims to follow three phases in its conversion to a cryptography standard that is resilient to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, with early adoption of quantum-safe systems beginning in 2029.
The three phases are each focused on certain assets to transition individually, and start with foundational security components, move to core infrastructure services, and then end at all of Microsoft's services and endpoints. This approach aims to tackle the gargantuan task of completely overhauling Microsoft’s suite of digital products and services in an organized and timely manner, “While scalable quantum computing is not available today, the time to prepare is now,” the plan said. Updating the foundational security components hinges on incorporating quantum-safe key exchange mechanisms into Microsoft’s architecture so as to incorporate the available PQC algorithms across the company’s software platforms. More information is posted on the NextGov website.
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DARPA aims for interoperability between classic and quantum communication: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is angling to lay the groundwork for a computational network that can integrate both traditional and quantum-powered systems ahead of further breakthroughs in quantum information sciences and technology. The QuANET program — an abbreviation for quantum augmented network — was started in March 2024 with the goal of marrying the benefits of traditional and quantum networking on existing U.S. computing infrastructure and network protocols. QuANET Program Manager Allyson O’Brien told Nextgov/FCW that networking is the “black sheep” within the quantum technology realm, despite a pressing need for more fundamental infrastructure that can support quantum-enabled systems. “On this program, the challenge is: How do we integrate quantum systems on our current communication infrastructure,” she said. “What do they look like as sensors, as better timekeepers and as novel types of data carriers? What can we do with them that you would not be able to do with the traditional communications media we have now?” More information is posted on the NextGov website.
National Science Foundation
National Institutes of Health
NASA
The NJIT Proposal Submission Guidelines and Policy provides the expected institutional timeline for proposal submission. Streamlyne User Manuals are posted on https://research.njit.edu/streamlyne. For contact information on proposal submission, pre-award services and post-award grant management, please visit research website https://research.njit.edu/researchers and https://research.njit.edu/contact.