EAGER Grant
The EAGER funding mechanism supports exploratory work in early stages on untested but potentially transformative research ideas or approaches that are considered “high-risk, high-reward.”
EAGER proposals are reviewed internally by NSF, which allows for shorter time between proposal submission and available funding. Awards provide up to $300,000 for a period of up to two years.
For more information, please visit: Opportunities for Early-Career Researchers – Funding at NSF | NSF – National Science Foundation
Quilt EAGER Project
Since 2015 The Quilt has hosted the annual NSF CC* PI Meeting, collocating it with other meetings, including The Quilt Member’s Meeting. Collocating the CC* PI Meeting with The Quilt and other national meetings has encouraged relationships between organizations associated with campus cyberinfrastructure, science driven applications, and regional and national
cyberinfrastructure resources. However, this broader engagement is currently limited to just those with NSF CC* awards, a small fraction of the small colleges and universities nationwide. Based on discussions at the most recent CC* PI Meeting (September 2023), The Quilt determined a pilot of regional or state-based campus cyberinfrastructure focused workshops could be more inclusive and foster collaborations between small institutions and cyberinfrastructure resources in their region, including with regional networks. As described
below, in addition to using the CC* PI Workshops as a model, The Quilt plans to learn from members already actively engaged in outreach, services, and workshops fostering small institution participation in their broader cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.
This Regional CI Connect pilot project will be implemented in three phases. Phase I, Planning and Engagement, will focus on analyzing the current environment, engaging with regional networks, codifying existing and identifying new areas of interest and organizations to collaborate with, and curating existing materials. Phase II, Workshops, will focus on organizing,
scheduling, and hosting three regional workshops. Phase III, Assessment and Sustainability will take the lessons learned from implementing the initial set of workshops and develop a workshop model that can be implemented by other regional organizations.
Broader Impacts
The broader impact of the project, through the three regional pilot workshops, is to begin to address and reduce the persistent gap between cyberinfrastructure resources understood and available to the faculty, students and staff at the larger R1 IHEs that is often not commonly or easily available to faculty and students at smaller, lesser-resourced IHEs. The Regional CI
Connect Days model, based on the initial workshops, will provide a long-term, sustainable mechanism for engaging a broad set of IHEs, meeting them where they are and focusing on research and education topics of interest to them, thereby accelerating the adoption of cyberinfrastructure technologies and resources as well as the development of cyberinfrastructure knowledge and skills.