NASA Debuts Initiative Where University Students Lead

Confident that some of the solutions to future challenges in aviation are locked inside the minds of today’s university students, NASA is debuting a new mechanism for working with academia to identify and inspire the next generation of aeronautical innovators.

The University Leadership Initiative will competitively award funds to teams led by universities who, working with their research partners, will develop solutions for technical challenges found in six research thrusts associated with safely growing the air transportation system, reducing fuel consumption and carbon emissions, and applying converging technologies to transform aviation.

“The most enticing part of this initiative is that university-led teams will independently define the technical challenges they want to work on, so long as they are in support of one of the six research thrusts,” said Richard Barhydt, deputy director of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program.

The university teams also will lay out major milestones and conduct the research activities needed to achieve their technical challenges, Barhydt said.

To learn more about the initiative’s intent, scope and selection criteria, interested parties are invited to attend a virtual Applicant’s Workshop on Tuesday, May 3, 2016, from 12:30 – 3:00 p.m. EDT. Questions may be submitted in advance to to hq-univpartnerships@mail.nasa.gov (those submitted by 5:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, April 29, will be addressed first). Details on how to participate are located on this page.

Research will be required to support one or more of these six strategic thrust areas that focus on addressing major challenges to aviation. NASA

“We are very hopeful that by providing this workshop we can entice universities who might not have worked with NASA before, or are unsure of the application process, to actually take a chance and make a run at being part of aviation history,” said Barhydt.

NASA is using NSPIRES, the tool for issuing NASA Research Announcements, to coordinate the solicitation and proposal process. The first opportunity to propose for the University Leadership Initiative is listed under Amendment 2 on the NSPIRES page. Notices of intent to propose are due May 5, 2016; first-stage proposals are due June 7, 2016.

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