Using the Rules of Life to Address Societal Challenges | 23 512

Opportunity Information: Apply for 23 512

Using the Rules of Life to Address Societal Challenges (URoLASC) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant opportunity that funds use-inspired, convergent research aimed at turning prior basic discoveries about how living systems work into practical benefits for society. The program builds directly on NSF's earlier "Big Ideas" investments, especially the Understanding the Rules of Life effort, which focused on developing predictive understanding of how key properties of organisms and ecosystems emerge from interactions among genomes, phenotypes, and changing environments. URoLASC shifts the emphasis from discovering new biological "rules" to applying established and emerging rules-of-life insights in ways that can help address urgent real-world problems.

The central idea is to use predictive capabilities derived from biology to tackle major societal challenges that are linked to living systems and their interactions with the environment. The solicitation highlights a wide range of target issues, including climate change and related risks (such as geohazards, extreme events, and biodiversity loss), environmental degradation affecting land and water resources, inequities in the availability of and access to essential natural assets, lack of sustainability in systems tied to food, energy, and waste, and threats from pandemic disease. Projects are expected to draw lessons from studying rules of life across many kinds of organisms and ecosystems, and then use that knowledge to design, test, and evaluate approaches that can lead to measurable societal outcomes.

URoLASC differs from earlier Rules of Life solicitations in several important ways that shape how proposals should be written and how projects should be run. First, the starting point is societal benefit rather than fundamental discovery, meaning investigators are expected to clearly articulate how the research will be used and why it matters outside academia. Second, proposals are expected to begin by describing the anticipated outcomes and broader impacts of the work, and then explain the intellectual and technical research plan that will deliver those outcomes. In practice, that means the "what will change and for whom" should be presented up front, with the science and engineering details framed as the engine that enables those changes.

A third defining feature is the requirement for a co-production strategy. Applicants must involve both the producers of knowledge (researchers) and the users of knowledge (such as community partners, practitioners, decision-makers, industry, nonprofits, agencies, or other stakeholders) throughout all phases of the project. This is not limited to outreach at the end; it is meant to be embedded from the beginning through design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination. The goal is to ensure that research outputs are relevant, usable, and more likely to be adopted, while also allowing the research questions and methods to be shaped by real constraints and needs.

Fourth, URoLASC requires strong integration of innovative education and training that supports convergent research. Projects should not treat workforce development as an add-on; instead, they are expected to create learning and training structures that help students, postdocs, and other trainees work effectively across disciplines, methods, and sectors. This could include cross-training across biology, engineering, computer science, geoscience, social science, or policy-relevant fields, as long as it is tightly connected to the project goals and the co-production approach.

Fifth, the solicitation places clear expectations on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Teams are expected to actively broaden participation and include people from underrepresented groups, including groups described as the "Missing Millions," and to support participation of women and others historically underrepresented in STEM across roles such as PIs/co-PIs, trainees, and key project personnel. The program also encourages proposals involving a broad range of institution types, including predominantly undergraduate institutions, minority-serving institutions that are not among the most research-intensive, other Carnegie-classified R2, D/PU, and M1-3 institutions, and institutions in EPSCoR-eligible jurisdictions. This emphasis signals that NSF is looking not only for strong science and strong impacts, but also for project structures that expand who gets to lead and benefit from this kind of convergent work.

Administratively, URoLASC is a cross-directorate NSF program, meaning it is designed to pull expertise and perspectives from multiple NSF areas rather than sitting entirely within one disciplinary lane. Even so, proposals must be submitted through the Emerging Frontiers (EF) Division within the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO), and review is handled by a multidisciplinary, cross-directorate team of program officers. The funding instrument is a grant, with an award ceiling of $3,000,000 and an expectation of about 15 awards under the opportunity described. The opportunity is listed under NSF funding opportunity number 23-512, with CFDA numbers that span multiple NSF programs, reflecting the broad, cross-cutting nature of the work.

In plain terms, URoLASC is designed for teams that can connect predictive biology to concrete societal outcomes, show credible partnerships with real-world users of the results, and build a training and participation model that strengthens the future convergent research workforce. The strongest-fit projects are likely to be those that can explain, in a practical and testable way, how understanding living systems can directly inform strategies for resilience, sustainability, health security, environmental stewardship, and equitable access to natural resources, and that can demonstrate from the start how stakeholders will help shape and use what the research produces.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Using the Rules of Life to Address Societal Challenges" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.041, 47.049, 47.050, 47.070, 47.074, 47.075, 47.076, 47.079, 47.083, 47.084.
• This funding opportunity was created on Oct 28, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Feb 15, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $3,000,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 15 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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