FY2018 VANNEVAR BUSH FACULTY FELLOWSHIP

Description

The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF) program is sponsored by the Basic Research Office, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (ASD (R&E)). VBFF supports innovative basic research within academia, as well as opportunities intended to develop the next generation of scientists and engineers for the defense workforce. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) manages the VBFF program for ASD (R&E). To accomplish this task, ONR is soliciting proposals for the VBFF program through this FOA. This FOA seeks distinguished researchers for the purpose of conducting innovative basic research in areas of interest to the DoD and fostering long-term relationships between the VBFF Fellows and the DoD. As defined by the DoD, basic research is “systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and of observable facts without specific applications towards processes or products in mind. It includes all scientific study and experimentation directed toward increasing fundamental knowledge and understanding in those fields of the physical, engineering, environmental, and life sciences related to long-term national security needs. It is farsighted high payoff research that provides the basis for technological progress.” (http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/fmr/Volume_02b.pdf ) The DoD’s basic research program invests broadly in many scientific fields to ensure that it has early cognizance of new scientific knowledge. VBFF is oriented towards bold and ambitious “blue sky” research that may lead to extraordinary outcomes such as revolutionizing entire disciplines, creating entirely new fields, or disrupting accepted theories and perspectives. Objectives of the program are to: • Support unclassified basic scientific and engineering research that could be the foundation for future revolutionary new capabilities for DoD • Educate and train student and post-doctoral researchers for the defense workforce • Foster long-term relationships between university researchers and the DoD • Familiarize university researchers and their students with DoD’s current and projected future challenges • Increase the number of talented technical experts that DoD can call upon. This FOA is for single investigator grant proposals for basic research in one or more of the following technical subject categories of interest to the DoD. 1. Engineering Biology: Engineering biology is an emerging discipline that is positioned to become a powerful technology for the potential production of DoD-relevant materials, the development of new sensing modalities, and maintaining warfighter resilience and performance. Engineering biology applies biological principles to the engineering of living biological (natural or synthetic) or artificial systems to develop novel systems or products. Revolutionary basic research engineering biology could lead to new capabilities for the DoD in: Specialty Materials- The commercial sector has examples of microorganisms engineered to produce commodity chemicals such as fuels and pharmaceuticals. However, can biological systems be engineered to produce more complex molecules or three-dimensional materials? Do biological systems have unique or more efficient capabilities to produce complex materials and chemicals? Sensing- DOD has unique sensing needs including the need for detecting unusual signatures, clandestine sensing, and sensing environmental biological molecules and chemicals. Biological systems with their molecular interactions and precise control can have an impact in this capability. Antibodies and RNA aptamers have been traditionally applied in this space and are a relatively mature technology. VBFF is interested in new and unique approaches to biological sensing. VBFF is particularly interested in innovative and fundamental approaches to understanding biological process with the eventual goal of facilitating the engineering of biological systems. Multidisciplinary as well as theoretical, physical, biophysical, biochemical, molecular, and synthetic biology approaches are likely necessary to overcome the technical hurdles that currently prevent biology from being a scalable top-down engineering discipline. Basic research that could employ more engineering principles to biology is relevant to VBFF. Ground-breaking basic research that would expand the repertoire of biological engineering platforms from lab-based domesticated prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms (E. coli, for example) to more “wild” environmental organisms, microbial consortia, as well as single and multi-cellular eukaryotic systems that can be deployed into real-world environments are also of interest. 2. Quantum Information Science: Quantum Information Science (QIS) focuses on the creation, control, and manipulation of non-classical states of light and matter with potential for exceeding classical limits in communications, sensing, metrology, imaging, computing and simulation. The development of QIS was precipitated by the demonstration of a "quantum advantage" in computing due to development of Shor's factoring algorithm and Grover's search algorithm in the mid-1990s, which offered quantum speedups (in the former case, what seems to be an exponential speedup). The potential impacts of QIS on DoD capabilities may include ensuring information security, enabling novel materials design, attaining precise navigation and positioning even without GPS, improved sensing, and accomplishing significant improvements in high resolution imaging. Developments of new algorithms that provide a "quantum advantage" are needed for quantum computing to be more than a niche application. Beyond computing, and even beyond QIS per se, of great interest is the development of small- or medium-sized quantum systems to enable the study of exotic physics that could lead to novel future technologies. This program seeks ambitious proposals that are expected to either advance the knowledge of QIS, or to disrupt the current research directions of QIS. Exploration of the limitations of QIS is highly encouraged. 3. Cognitive Neuroscience: Maintaining human cognitive effectiveness and emotional resilience are important capabilities for the DOD since the physical, emotional stress and cognitive demands of warfighters is constantly increasing with the growing volume of data presented by today's technologies. Loss of neural function due to warfighter brain injury is also of concern. Understanding neural activity for motor and cognitive functions in humans is of interest to support development of neural interfaces for warfighters that lose capability due to brain injury. DOD has several research and development thrusts in the development of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to allow the control of prosthetics to restore warfighter capability after injury. Additionally, the identification of cognitive neuroscience principles of the mind that can be emulated for sensing, pattern recognition and control and as neuromorphic electronic designs are of interest to DOD. Recent advancements in neuroscience have shown that neuronal activity is organized at the molecular, neuron, neural circuit, and brain structural levels. In particular, computational neuroscience work is making strides to use empirical data to model functional activities at each of these brain structural levels. Fundamental neuroscience studies of the molecular and cellular processes that contribute to the cognitive activities are also making great strides to understand the human mind. The VBFF Program is interested in forward-thinking and hypothesis-driven theoretical, computational, neuronal, and molecular basic neuroscience research to study the mechanisms of human cognitive skills. Research on large-scale models of cortical systems and neural-based cognitive architectures capable of addressing human cognitive skills such as attention, memory, spatial cognition, complex motor skills and language processing are also encouraged. 4. Novel Engineered Materials: Engineered materials exhibit behaviors that are not observed in naturally occurring materials, but rather originate from careful designs of the structure. One example is meta-materials with negative index of refraction that can direct and focus light in ways that natural crystals cannot. Other engineered materials include superlattices, quantum dots, and ordered arrays of nanoholes which can form photonics waveguides. Recent demonstrations of structural meta-materials promise unique combinations of physical properties. Understanding and controlling evolution of material behaviors is an area of interest. Conventional modeling and experimental techniques do not take far-from-equilibrium phenomena into account. Understanding and controlling irreversible material phenomena under extreme environments, e.g. high temperatures, high strain rates, radioactivity, etc., may lead to significant advances in materials design capabilities and in manufacturing process development. This program seeks curiosity-driven research with the focus on discovery of new materials that enable transformative functionalities and performance under extreme conditions. 5. Applied Mathematics (theory and experiments) and Statistics: Many crucial DoD capabilities of the future will rely on mathematical breakthroughs made today. Basic research in applied mathematics can have broad-ranging impacts, by laying the basic foundations for progress in multiple areas. Examples of important areas that will require such foundations include, but are not limited to: generalized machine learning; mathematical foundations of deep learning network; common sense enabled artificial intelligence; the analysis and exploitation of very large data sets; the fundamental understanding of the behavior of sociotechnical networks

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