Opportunity Information: Apply for 21 596
The Environmental Convergence Opportunities in Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (ECO-CBET) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant opportunity designed to push environmental engineering and sustainability research forward by forcing truly integrated, cross-discipline teamwork. The central idea is that many of today’s toughest environmental problems are not going to be solved by advances inside a single field. Instead, NSF is looking for convergence research, meaning research that deliberately blends theories, tools, and methods from multiple areas into one coordinated effort aimed at a shared outcome. The solicitation is framed around the National Academies’ “Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing Grand Challenges” report, which lays out five broad societal challenges: sustainably supplying food, water, and energy; curbing climate change and adapting to its impacts; designing a future without pollution and waste; creating efficient, healthy, and resilient cities; and fostering informed decisions and actions. ECO-CBET is meant to generate foundational scientific and engineering knowledge that can enable new materials, processes, and systems capable of addressing these challenges at scale.
A major emphasis of ECO-CBET is on fundamental research that clarifies underlying mechanisms, rather than incremental applied demonstrations. NSF is signaling that it wants teams to dig into the “why” and “how” of environmental and sustainability phenomena so that genuinely new design principles can emerge. The program encourages projects where the outcome is not just a solution to a narrow problem, but a deeper platform of knowledge that can be used to design next-generation technologies, whether that means new catalytic pathways, novel separations, engineered biological systems, advanced transport models, or integrated process systems that reduce emissions and waste. While proposals can address a wide range of environmental engineering and sustainability topics, the solicitation particularly highlights work connected to climate change mitigation and reducing the environmental impacts of climate change, reflecting the urgency and cross-cutting nature of that area.
The “CBET” in ECO-CBET refers to NSF’s Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems within the Directorate for Engineering. The solicitation explicitly draws on CBET’s core research communities and expects teams to be built from them in a way that creates complementary and distinct expertise. The relevant clusters include Chemical Process Systems (with areas like catalysis, electrochemical systems, interfacial engineering, reaction engineering, and molecular thermodynamics), Engineering Biology and Health (including biosensing, cellular and biochemical engineering, and biomedical systems), Environmental Engineering and Sustainability (environmental engineering, environmental sustainability, and nanoscale interactions), and Transport Phenomena (fluid dynamics, multiphase and particulate processes, combustion and fire systems, and thermal transport). A key point is that NSF is not just encouraging collaboration between neighboring subfields; it is explicitly inviting creative partnerships between CBET communities that do not typically intersect, with the expectation that those unfamiliar connections can unlock new approaches.
Team structure is a core requirement rather than an afterthought. Proposals must name at least three investigators, and each investigator must bring a unique perspective or skill set that is essential to the overall approach. In practice, this means NSF is looking for more than a “menu” of separate work packages; it wants tight integration where the disciplines are interdependent and the research plan is coordinated over time. Beyond the three required investigators representing distinct CBET-supported communities, teams may also include additional participants from manufacturing, other scientific fields, or social, behavioral, and economic sciences if that broadens the impact or strengthens the pathway to real-world relevance. Just as important, ECO-CBET emphasizes workforce development: training students and early-career researchers to operate across disciplinary boundaries is viewed as a necessary condition for long-term progress on complex sustainability problems.
In terms of funding and scale, ECO-CBET awards are expected to be large, multi-year projects. Typical awards are anticipated to range from about $1.5 million to $1.7 million total over four years, with budgets expected to match the ambition and scope of the work. Subject to available funding, awards may be eligible for a single renewal, potentially extending total support to eight years, but renewal is not automatic and would require a competitive merit review. NSF indicates that, assuming sufficient budget support, the competition is expected to run annually, though the specific topic priorities can shift from year to year. The opportunity is administered as a discretionary grant under CFDA 47.041, with the agency listed as the National Science Foundation and an expected number of awards around six for the cycle described in the source information.
Overall, ECO-CBET is best understood as NSF’s push for high-impact, mechanism-driven environmental and climate-related research that is built from the start around convergence. The program is aiming for projects where interdisciplinary integration is not just present, but essential, and where the payoff is both new foundational knowledge and a credible pathway to innovative technologies and systems that can meaningfully address environmental sustainability challenges.Apply for 21 596
- The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Environmental Convergence Opportunities in Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems" and is now available to receive applicants.
- Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.041.
- This funding opportunity was created on Jul 03, 2021.
- Applicants must submit their applications by Jan 31, 2022 Preliminary Proposal Deadline Date Full Proposal Deadline Date. (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 $1,700,000.00 in funding.
- The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 6 candidate(s).
- Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).
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