DOE Office of Science: aligning with priority research areas and national lab partnerships

The Strategy

The DOE Office of Science is the largest federal sponsor of basic research in the physical sciences. Their funding is organized into six core programs: Basic Energy Sciences (BES), Biological and Environmental Research (BER), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), Fusion Energy Sciences (FES), High Energy Physics (HEP), and Nuclear Physics (NP). Your proposal must fit one of these programs. The priority alignment: each program has named priority areas that change with each FOA (Funding Opportunity Announcement). Read the FOA carefully and align your proposal with the named priorities. A proposal that is excellent science but outside the FOA scope will be declined without review. The national lab partnership: DOE strongly encourages partnerships with national labs (Argonne, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia, etc.). If your university research can leverage a national lab facility (a light source, a supercomputer, a particle accelerator), partner…