National Science Foundation
Call for proposals: Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF)

Review

Eligibility

All NSF and NSERC eligibility requirements must be met before submitting an application. Each agency is responsible for reviewing the eligibility of its researchers, institutions and subject matter.

When your simplified Alliance application is received, NSERC first undertakes an administrative assessment to ensure the application is complete and complies with all requirements.

NSERC will review the eligibility of Canadian participants on DMREF proposals using the simplified Alliance application.

In supporting research partnerships that endeavour to obtain the greatest possible benefits to Canada and for Canadians, NSERC reserves the right to:

• determine the eligibility of proposals and request additional information from Canadian applicants, as may be required for the review of their application;
• interpret the regulations and policies governing the national funding opportunities;
• apply conditions to individual grants as appropriate;
• terminate, suspend, reduce the amount or duration, or change the terms and conditions of an award with due notice to comply with Government of Canada laws, regulations, policies and directives, which are subject to change.

NSF intends to return, without review, proposals that do not meet the eligibility requirements. Only applications deemed eligible by both NSF and NSERC will proceed to merit assessment.

Merit assessment mechanisms

Full applications submitted to the NSF will be reviewed in competition with other proposals using the NSF’s merit review process. NSERC will be invited to suggest reviewers, and NSERC representatives will observe the review process. NSERC will not conduct a parallel merit review.

Evaluation criteria

The merit of your NSF application will be assessed using the evaluation criteria outlined in the NSF solicitation (section VI. NSF proposal processing and review procedures).

Specifically, reviewers will be asked to assess proposals using the following approved National Science Board criteria:

• Intellectual Merit: The Intellectual Merit criterion encompasses the potential to advance knowledge.
• Broader Impacts: The Broader Impacts criterion encompasses the potential to benefit society and contribute to achieving specific, desired societal outcomes.

In addition to the above, the following specific criteria will be used to assess DMREF proposals:

• How effectively does the proposed work help accelerate materials discovery, understanding, and/or development by building the fundamental knowledge base needed to progress toward designing and making materials with specific, desired functions or properties?
• How effectively does the proposed research use collaborative processes with iterative feedback among tasks? Do the materials synthesis/growth/processing techniques, characterization/testing methodology, theory/mathematics, data science, and computation/simulation aspects of the project strongly interact with each other to promote significant advances in each of these components and advance materials design?
• How effectively does the proposed work provide training for the next generation of scientists and engineers, educated in a multidisciplinary, integrated experimental and computational approach to materials research? Has adequate data-related training been provided for students and postdoctoral researchers, as needed?
• How appropriate is the Data Management Plan for the type of data that the project is expected to create? How effectively does the proposal convey that the digital data generated by the project will be made freely available within a reasonable time from publication, without the need for request to the investigator, in a way that the data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR)? 

Funding decision

NSF and NSERC will determine recommendation outcomes for the proposals submitted to NSF which have undergone a merit review. NSERC’s funding decision will take into consideration the NSF merit review.

When making its funding decisions, NSERC will take into account the involvement of the Canadian team as described in both the NSF application and in the NSERC proposal, as well as the benefit to Canada and the concrete measures to support EDI in the training plan as laid out in the simplified Alliance proposal you will submit to NSERC.

Where applicable, NSERC’s funding decision will consider the potential risks for Canada’s national security pursuant to the National Security Guidelines for Research Partnerships.

Once a funding decision has been made, the US PI will receive feedback about their proposal. NSF will send the PI copies of reviews, excluding the names of the reviewers or any reviewer-identifying information. NSERC will provide separate notifications of awards to the Canada-based researchers on successful proposals.