NSF CAREER grants: recently funded projects and award sizes

Project length

5 years

Who applies

Untenured assistant professors (or equivalent) in their first CAREER-eligible years

Project Description

15 pages, including the integrated education plan

Budget

A minimum total award set in the solicitation, higher in some directorates

Limits change between notices: the notice you apply to is what counts.

• Open22-586

  Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER)

  Deadline Jul 28, 2027

• CAREER: Understanding Florida Sea-Breeze Convection Using High-Resolution Remote Sensing and Artificial Intelligence

  Yixin Wen · SUNY at Stony Brook, NY · GEO · $660K · Oct 22, 2026

  Sea-breeze thunderstorms occur in warm, coastal regions due to the difference in heating of land and water surfaces. While the basic sea-breeze process is well-known, the details of why some days with seemingly similar conditions produce strong, weak, or no storms is less understood. This award provides funding for a…

• CAREER: Uncovering small RNA and chromatin modifying pathway interactions that regulate transcriptome homeostasis

  Alicia K Rogers · University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc, GA · BIO · $1.2M · Oct 14, 2026

  Proper coordination of gene regulation is essential to the viability of all organisms. RNA interference (RNAi) and chromatin modifying pathways are dynamic networks critical to regulating the genome and executing cellular programs in all metazoans, including humans. While we understand much about the basic molecular…

• CAREER: Integrating Heterogenous Health Data for Improved Predictive and Explainable Methods

  Ritambhara Singh · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL · CSE · $600K · Oct 14, 2026

  Understanding and improving human health is a complex challenge because it involves multiple types of information, including medical records, images or scans, laboratory tests and genetic data. Each type of information provides a distinct piece of the puzzle. However, these pieces don’t always fit together easily…

• CAREER: Conformal Methods for Responsible Language Models

  Lu Cheng · Pennsylvania State Univ University Park, PA · CSE · $600K · Oct 14, 2026

  This project seeks to develop responsible language models (LMs) with rigorous guarantees. LMs have significantly advanced deep learning, reshaping the modeling and resolution of predictive tasks, yet in the real world, their deployment often results in errors. This undermines trust in artificial intelligence (AI)…

• CAREER: Combining Machine Learning and Physics-based Modeling Approaches for Accelerating Scientific Discovery

  Xiaowei Jia · Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ · CSE · $600K · Oct 8, 2026

  Recent advances in machine learning make it possible to capture spatial and temporal dependencies from complex data, leading to tremendous success in several commercial applications where large-scale data are available. Given their success in commercial domains, machine-learning models are beginning to play an…

• CAREER: Temporal Learning Towards Trustworthy Decision for Healthcare

  Xiaolei Huang · University of Missouri-Columbia, MO · CSE · $500K · Oct 8, 2026

  In healthcare machine learning (ML) models, the data characteristics can change over time. These models are trained on existing and historical data but are intended to be applied to future, unseen data for prediction. Temporal shifts in data, labels, and patient populations may undermine confidence in the use of ML…

• CAREER: Modern Aspects of Learning-Augmented Algorithms

  Ali Vakilian · Rutgers University Newark, NJ · CSE · $711K · Sep 23, 2026

  Many important artificial intelligence computing systems rely on algorithms to make decisions about scheduling, routing, and the use of limited resources. Traditional algorithms are dependable because their performance can be guaranteed in all cases, but they often cannot take advantage of recurring patterns in data…

• CAREER: The Effect of Trial-Level Lexical Entropy on Language Processing

  Hossein Karimi · CSU Fullerton Auxiliary Services Corporation, CA · SBE · $572K · Sep 23, 2026

  Understanding and producing language is so commonplace that we may fail to appreciate the complexities involved in them. Intrinsically meaningless speech sounds and letter shapes hit our eardrums or eyeballs, and, through a series of processing steps are turned into meaningful ideas in our heads. We can do this…

• CAREER: Understanding the dynamics and predictability of land-to-aquatic nitrogen loading under climate extremes by combining deep learning with process-based modeling

  Chaoqun Lu · University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI · GEO · $610K · Sep 22, 2026

  Increases in global crop yield largely rely on nitrogen (N) fertilizer input. However, excessive N applications on land have profoundly impacted aquatic ecosystems, leading to eutrophication, hypoxia (dead zones), and harmful algal blooms (HABs) in estuarine and near-shore seas. Despite great progress in understanding…

• CAREER: Confinement Induced Structural Evolution of Calcium- and Magnesium- Carbonates in Architected Siliceous Nanochannels

  Greeshma Gadikota · Columbia University, NY · ENG · $535K · Sep 18, 2026

  Advancing gigaton-scale solutions to capture, convert, store, and remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from gas emissions and air is crucial to limit the detrimental environmental impacts of climate change. Carbon mineralization is a scalable and thermodynamically favorable approach for converting anthropogenic CO2 into…

• CAREER: Analytic and High-dimensional Methods in Probability

  Marcus Michelen · Northwestern University at Chicago, IL · MPS · $400K · Sep 18, 2026

  This project focuses on the mathematical area of probability theory, the study of random structures. Random structures are ubiquitous throughout the sciences for their use as models as well as their use in the design of algorithms. The main focus of this project is on random structures in high dimensions, meaning…

• CAREER: From Redundancy to Efficiency -- Scalable, Observable Multicast for AI Datacenters

  Soudeh Ghorbani · Rutgers University Newark, NJ · CSE · $700K · Sep 17, 2026

  Artificial intelligence systems rely on large groups of computers working together, but communication between these machines is becoming a major bottleneck. Today, many systems send the same data repeatedly between machines, which wastes time, energy, and network capacity. This project develops new ways for computers…

• CAREER: Trapped-ion Quantum Information Processing with Phonon Modulation

  Wenchao Ge · University of Missouri-Columbia, MO · MPS · $500K · Sep 15, 2026

  Quantum information processing harnesses the principles of quantum mechanics to perform computation, communication, and sensing tasks with unprecedented capabilities beyond any classical devices. Investing in quantum information research is crucial for the US economic and national security. Trapped ions are one of the…

• CAREER: From Underground to Space: An AI Infrastructure for Multiscale 3D Crop Modeling and Assessment

  Guoyu Lu · Indiana University, IN · CSE · $550K · Sep 9, 2026

  A crop's traits and 3D structure (the shape and architecture of plants, including both above- and below-ground parts) are the attributes that chiefly influence crop growth and yield and provide critical evidence for plant phenotyping (the characterization assessment of plant traits). Crop yield predictions can be made…

• CAREER: Modulation of Propagating Instabilities in Deployable Shell Structures

  Andrew Lee · Johns Hopkins University, MD · ENG · $649K · Sep 1, 2026

  This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will support research focused on understanding the prevailing conditions for propagating instabilities and creating methods for regulating their behavior in deployable shell structures. Highly deformable thin shells can be elastically stowed and self-deployed while…

1. 1Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI17
2. 2University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL16
3. 3University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI14
4. 4Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA14
5. 5Cornell University, NY13
6. 6University of Washington, WA13
7. 7University of Florida, FL12
8. 8University of Maryland, College Park, MD12
9. 9Johns Hopkins University, MD11
10. 10Purdue University, IN11

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