Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI)

Overview

<p>Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research aimed at strengthening America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. Achieving these objectives requires the integration of expertise from across all science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how fundamental knowledge about human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. Successful projects will represent a convergence of expertise in one or more SBE sciences deeply integrated with other disciplines to support substantial and potentially pathbreaking, fundamental research applied to strengthening a specific and focal infrastructure.</p> <p>Many infrastructure projects entail extensive planning and large initial costs. Those substantial investments are worthwhile to the extent they provide long-term benefit and meet the needs of all people for a range of functions. Building such effective infrastructure requires deep understanding of economic and social dynamics, and the perceptions and choices of many diverse individuals and communities. Whether involving transportation, energy, broadband, water, security, health, education, communication, or other essential services, infrastructure design that puts people and social welfare first, is more likely to gain public support, to function more effectively, to serve more people.</p> <p><strong>This solicitation will support projects in three categories:</strong></p> <p><strong>1. Planning Proposals</strong> - A planning proposal is for support of the initial conceptualization, planning and collaboration activities aimed at formulating new and sound plans for large-scale projects. NSF is especially interested in activities that will catalyze new collaborations that broaden the participation of individuals or organizations underrepresented in NSF award portfolios. SAI Planning Grants are intended to stimulate research capacity through multidisciplinary team-building and the development of high-impact, fundamental research concepts relating to strengthening American infrastructure. These grants will support a range of planning activities intended to foster a convergent research approach that can effectively integrate SBE disciplinary perspectives with those of areas supported by other NSF Directorates or Office in addressing the design, development and sustainability of a specific focal infrastructure. Planning projects will build collaborations with relevant stakeholders, and seek to identify research gaps, questions, and hypotheses. <em>Activities may include, but are not limited to:</em> travel, multidisciplinary workshops, stakeholder meetings, data collection, preliminary experiments, and pilot studies. </p> <p><strong>2. Research Proposals</strong> SAI research proposals will integrate SBE disciplinary perspectives with those of areas supported by other NSF Directorates and/or Office in addressing the design, development and sustainability of a specific focal infrastructure. These projects must advance fundamental understanding of how a human-centered approach will support and strengthen American infrastructure. Pursuing a convergent research approach, projects should apply knowledge, techniques, and expertise from multiple fields and sectors to create new frameworks and expand existing frameworks for addressing the research goals. The proposal should describe the symbiosis within the multidisciplinary team, including stakeholders in the infrastructure context, and how the team will collaborate. Proposals should aim to advance understanding of how to improve and strengthen American infrastructure, and not merely the human and societal impacts of infrastructure. Projects will advance the basic science supporting improved infrastructure planning, development, and implementation. They will also include tests or demonstrations of feasibility with infrastructure stakeholders and testbeds.</p> <p><strong>3. Conference Proposals </strong></p> <p><strong></strong>Conference (or workshop) proposals will focus on developing partnerships and collaborations between basic research teams and infrastructure stakeholders. These activities will aim to facilitate the utilization and transition to scale of relevant advances in basic science that contribute human-centered approaches to the design, development and sustainability of a specific focal infrastructure. The conference proposal option is not intended to support the planning of future research proposals.</p>