Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation
Due Dates: Rolling (Full proposals accepted anytime)
Funding Amounts: $280 million anticipated across BIO Core; 250–300 awards; proposals requesting up to five years encouraged
Summary: Supports fundamental research on natural and synthetic living systems, from biomolecules and cells to whole organisms.
Key Information: Submit through BIO Core (NSF 26-517), which centrally assigns proposals to appropriate review units.
Description
Foundations of Life is a thematic area of NSF’s Directorate for Biological Sciences, supporting fundamental research on natural and synthetic living systems, including neural systems, across diverse organisms. It seeks to explain biological structure, dynamics, mechanisms, function, and regulation from biomolecules and supramolecular assemblies through cells to whole organisms.
Topics include biomolecular interactions and quantum phenomena; molecular assembly and dynamics; cell structure; biomechanics; integrated physiology; cellular-to-behavioral neuroscience; development; and epigenetics and gene expression. Approaches may include engineering synthetic molecules, cells, tissues, or microbial communities to test biological principles, systems biology spanning cells to organisms, and combining experiments with computational modeling to predict emergent properties. Funding is available through BIO Core, which supports foundational and interdisciplinary biological research by single investigators, teams, and consortia.
