The Department of Defense last week announced plans to award $227 million over a five-year-period to 32 academic institutions to conduct multidisciplinary basic research.Awards are subject to the successful completion of negotiations between the academic institutions and DoD research offices that will make the awards: the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
The awards are the result of the fiscal 2010 competition ARO, ONR, and AFOSR performed under the DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program. The MURI program supports research by teams of investigators intersecting more than one traditional science and engineering discipline to speed up both research progress and transition of research results to application.
Based on the proposals selected in the fiscal 2010 competition, a total of 67 academic institutions are expected to participate in the 32 research efforts.
With the MURI program being highly competitive, ARO, ONR, and AFOSR solicited proposals in 30 topics important to DoD and received a total of 411 white papers, followed by 152 proposals. The awards announced last week were selected based on merit review by panels of experts.
The list of projects selected for fiscal 2010 funding may be found on the DoD website.
