USA’s MURI Issues $260M in University Research Awards
The US Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program works to support research that involves more than one traditional science and engineering discipline. Traditional research grants can be hard to come by in these cases, and few extend over multiple years but many complex problems require this approach. So, too, does talent development.
Hence MURI’s recent FY 2009 slate, involving $260 million awarded to 69 academic institutions, in order to fund 41 projects over the next 5 years. Exact amounts for each project will be negotiated between the winning institutions and the DoD research offices that will make the awards: the Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR).
ARO, ONR, and AFOSR solicited proposals in 32 topics important to the DoD, and received a total of 152 proposals. Some of the project topics and titles included:
- How Unsupervised Learning Impacts Training: From Brain to Behavior
- Unified Theories of Language and Cognition
- Signalling Network Interactions Controlling Mouse and Salamander Limb Regeneration
- Botnet Attribution and Removal: from Axioms to Theories to Practice. Botnets are often associated with viruses and denial of service attacks, via coordinated networks of malware placed on thousands of individual computers.
- Application Software and Data Protection for Untrusted Platforms
- Adaptive Networks for Threat and Intrusion Detection or Termination
- Application Software and Data Protection for Untrusted Platforms
- Computational Intelligence for Decentralized Teams of Autonomous Agents
- Distributed Learning and Information Dynamics in Networked Autonomous Systems
- Bio-Inspired Intelligent Sensing Materials for Fly-by-Feel Autonomous Vehicle
- Adaptive Structural Materials
- Transformation Optical Metamaterials
- Tailoring Electronic Bandgap of Nanostructured Graphene
- Fundamental Mechanisms, Predictive Modeling, and Novel Aerospace Applications of Plasma Assisted Combustion
- Ultracold Polar Molecules: New Phases of Matter for Quantum Information and Quantum Control
- Integrated Quantum Circuits
- Search for New Superconductors for Energy and Power Applications
See this US DoD release and its linked sheet of MURI 2009 awards [PDF].
