Global Centers: Use-Inspired Research Addressing Global Challenges in Climate Change and Clean Energy

Overview

This solicitation launches an ambitious new program to fund international, interdisciplinary collaborative research centers that will apply best practices of broadening participation and community engagement to develop use-inspired research on climate change and clean energy. This program will prioritize research collaborations fostering team science, community-engaged research, and use knowledge-to-action frameworks. The proposed research work should maximize the benefits of international, interdisciplinary collaborations.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

• Create physical or virtual international research Centers that advance innovative, interdisciplinary, use-inspired research and education on climate change and/or clean energy to address societal challenges through international collaboration and multi-stakeholder engagement.
• Promote international collaboration for advantages of scope, scale, flexibility, expertise, facilities, and/or access to specific geographic locations, to enable advances that could not occur otherwise.
• Expand opportunities for students and early career researchers to gain education and training in world class research while enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
• Engage multiple partners and stakeholders through practices such as: Team Science, Engaged Scholarship, and Knowledge-to-Action frameworks to empower them to solve urgent societal challenges at a regional scale.

PROJECT CHARACTERISTICS

• The research Centers should involve multiple constituencies and institutions. 
• Centers may involve collaboration with other international research partners beyond the initial bilateral or multilateral collaboration with Partner Countries.
• Centers will support use-inspired research directed by an ambitious research agenda to address a societal challenge of regional or global importance related to climate change and/or clean energy that requires international collaboration and multi-stakeholder engagement. 
• The Center must have a clearly defined research focus and demonstrate how international collaboration will produce innovative use-inspired outcomes in research and education
• Centers must integrate broadening participation activities fully into the scientific plan, recognizing that such activities not only help diversify the research workforce, but fundamentally impact how the science is conducted and who is involved and included in the development of scientific ideas.
• Centers must have clear research and educational plans with identified milestones, potential roadblock and ways to overcome them, as well as expected deliverables and outcomes with associated timelines within the funding-period timeframe.
• Teams proposing research to address societal challenges that disproportionately impact specific groups in the U.S. and/or abroad are strongly encouraged to engage stakeholders from the impacted groups as key partners in the research endeavor.
• Centers may exhibit diverse forms of organization, collaboration, and operation suited to support their priorities, approaches, and practice.
• Centers will identify and implement a structure that will enable interaction between the various institutions, stakeholders, and communities. The center may be completely virtual, or it may have a physical central location; however, the Global Centers (GC) program will not fund the building of a new physical infrastructure. Regardless, the chosen structure must have plans in place for enabling research across disciplines and institutions.
• Over the life span of the Center, it is anticipated that the research pursued and the activities it engages in may evolve. 
• Each Center should identify who are the relevant stakeholders and how it will engage them in a manner that will help drive the basic science research priorities. Stakeholders may be local communities, government (local, state and/or federal) agencies, nonprofit organizations, private sector businesses, and other entities.
• A Center may be focused on a geographic region but should explore science that is transferable to other locations or globally.
• Centers must provide meaningful international research experiences for U.S. and international partners' students.
• The Center should have a vision and strategy for potential growth, scaling up, and building a relevant community able to potentially carry out the work beyond the funding period. 

FUNDING TRACKS
FY2023 Global-Center program has two tracks. 

Track 1: Global-Center Implementation: Research Partnerships with Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Proposals must be aligned with topics identified by NSF and the international funding partners.  Track 1 proposals must include at least one institution in the U.S. partnering with at least one institution/researcher in at least one of the three partner countries eligible to receive funding from the respective funding partner agencies. Proposals can involve researchers and/or stakeholders in several of the partner countries. Beyond these countries, proposals may also involve partnership with stakeholders in other countries around the globe, provided that researchers from countries other than FY2023 partner countries secure their own sources of funding. 

Track 2: Community-driven Global Center Design. Track 2 awards will provide seed funding for U.S.-based researchers wishing to coordinate efforts to design a Global Center for the next NSF Global Centers competition. Track 2 proposals may involve partnership with researchers and stakeholders from any country globally but proposals must address use-inspired research in climate change and/or clean energy. . Track 2 will support coordination efforts to bring together new teams of researchers to develop research questions and viable partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, build research networks, synthesize data, and/or conduct exploratory research necessary to develop the scientific infrastructure to launch a Global Center in the future. We invite proposals from U.S.-based researchers that include global experts from any country, notably scientists and stakeholders based in regions of the world disproportionately affected by climate change.

Track 2 proposals must demonstrate a clear path toward the development of a future Global Center. Proposed activities must engage with the challenges involved in meeting the program goals described above and engage students and early-career researchers in the identification of knowledge gaps and professional skills for participation in international partnership to address a clearly identified global challenge.

Global Center Tracks at a Glance:

SUPPORTED RESEARCH THEMES
Proposals must focus on a clear research area within climate change and/or clean energy. Projects that focus on expanding operations or building capacity abroad are not appropriate for this call.

• Special Instructions for International Branch Campuses of US IHEs: If the proposal includes funding to be provided to an international branch campus of a US institution of higher education (including through use of subawards and consultant arrangements), the proposer must explain the benefit(s) to the project of performance at the international branch campus, and justify why the project activities cannot be performed at the US campus.
• For Track-1 proposals, eligibility criteria of all partner agencies involved in a given proposal must be met for the proposal to be compliant.

Track-1 Implementation awards:

• Estimated Number of Awards: 6 to 8, pending the availability of funds
• Anticipated Funding Amount: $25,000,000
• Award size is expected to be up to $5 million in total over 4 or 5 years.

Track-2 Design awards:

• Estimated Number of Awards: 10 to 15, pending the availability of funds.
• Anticipated Funding Amount: $3,000,000
• Award size is expected to be up to $250,000 in total over 2 years