Dear Colleague Letter: Special Guidelines for Submitting Collaborative Proposals under the US NSF/BIO - UK BBSRC Lead Agency Pilot opportunity

Funding Agency:
National Science Foundation

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Research Councils UK (RCUK) have signed a Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) on Research Cooperation. The MoU provides an overarching framework to encourage collaboration between US and UK research communities and sets out the principles by which jointly supported activities might be developed. The MoU provides for a lead agency arrangement whereby proposals may be submitted to either NSF (via FastLane) or one of the UK Research Councils (via Je-S).

The NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences (NSF/BIO) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) are pleased to announce a pilot program for the NSF/BIO - BBSRC lead agency arrangements under the NSF / RCUK Research Cooperation MoU. The pilot program allows for reciprocal acceptance of peer review through unsolicited mechanisms and its goal is to help reduce some of the current barriers to working internationally.

The pilot will allow US and UK researchers to submit a single collaborative proposal that will undergo a single review process. The pilot will operate for fall 2014 and fall 2015 submissions and proposals will be accepted for UK-US collaborative projects in the areas of intersection between NSF/BIO and BBSRC (responsive mode only) as set out below:

NSF/BIO Solicitations

Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences Solicitation NSF 13-510
Division of Biological Infrastructure Solicitation NSF 12-567

BBSRC Strategic Research Priorities, Responsive Mode

Data Driven Biology
Systems Approaches to the Biosciences
Synthetic Biology (Fall 2015 submissions only)

The intersection areas include systems biology, computational biology, bioinformatics and synthetic biology (fall 2015 only).

Proposals are expected to adhere to the remit, funding limits and grant duration for BBSRC responsive mode and NSF/BIO program(s) from which funding is sought. This document provides guidelines for the preparation, submission, peer review, and award of NSF/BIO-BBSRC Collaborative Proposals.

Proposers are advised that all documents submitted to NSF or BBSRC may be shared between these two organizations by email or other electronic means (e.g. secure extranet) in order to implement the two-way lead agency arrangements.

Eligibility

Faculty

Category

Medical - Basic Science
Environmental & Life Sciences
Engineering and Physical Sciences
Medical