NSF, in partnership with KnowInnovation, will be hosting a virtual Town Hall and two Scoping Sessions (one in-person and one virtual) focused on LIFE: Leveraging Innovations From Evolution. LIFE aims to bring together diverse scientists to think on specific research challenges and opportunities, including technological and educational training needs, that leverage convergent evolution to investigate the evolution of innovation and adaptive traits.

The informational Town Hall on May 15, 2023 1:00 – 2:30pm ET will include an overview of the goals of LIFE and provide details on the Scoping Sessions. The Registration Deadline for the Town Hall is May 14, 2023 at 5pm ET.

Click here to register for the Town Hall

The Scoping Sessions will be highly interactive, discussion- and solution-based aimed to provide actionable outcomes and recommendations to NSF for both near- and long-term research priorities. The Application Deadline for the Scoping Sessions is June 5, 2023 11:59 ET.

Click here to learn more about the Scoping Sessions and apply!

Specific goals of the LIFE Scoping Sessions:

• Engage the life sciences and adjacent communities to focus on research challenges and opportunities pertaining to evolutionary innovations within a convergent evolution framework to better understand generalizable as well as unique solutions to life’s common problems. 
• Articulate needs, strategies, and recommendations to enable transdisciplinary research into life’s evolutionary innovations and solutions to changing environments. This includes research, infrastructure, and educational priorities.
• Jumpstart ideas, build new networks and teams, and outline the most exciting areas of research that would leverage natural systems and convergently evolved innovations to help us more efficiently and effectively engineer new and sustainable technologies that power our economy.

Who Should Apply?

If you are eager to engage with diverse researchers to spark creative paths forward to advance our understanding of LIFE, join us!

We encourage researchers with interest and expertise in a variety of fields, including but not limited to the following: Systematics, Evolutionary Biology, Developmental Biology, Biomechanics, Physiology, Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, Cellular Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Chemistry, Computational Biology, Biological Informatics, Mathematical Modeling, Biogeography, Ecology, Synthetic Biology, Cyberinfrastructure, Biophysics and Engineering.