FIRST Awards
Nebraska EPSCoR's FIRST Award program is designed to help this state’s early career faculty to initiate their research programs and compete more effectively for NSF CAREER grants.
Approximately four FIRST Award grants are awarded per year to early career, tenure-track assistant professors at Nebraska institutions without Carnegie R1 status; the awards are limited to $40,000 each and require a 25% institutional match. The applicant must be in the first four years of their current academic appointment at the time of submittal and must still be eligible to apply for an NSF CAREER grant during or immediately following the FIRST Award period. Any project that potentially could be supported by a NSF competitive research grant is eligible.
The first step of the FIRST Award application process involves the submission of a short pre-proposal that will be reviewed by a panel comprised of members of Nebraska's scientific community. Approximately ten or fewer proposals are invited to advance to the second step: the submission of a full, NSF CAREER-like proposal. Full proposals from these Finalists will be evaluated using NSF proposal review criteria by external experts in the field. The Nebraska EPSCoR Committee will select FIRST Award Recipients.
FIRST Award Recipients are required to submit a CAREER Award proposal to NSF within the next award period. See Nebraska EPSCoR’s Apply for Funding page for submission details and use the active link to submit a pre-proposal online.
2026 FIRST Award submissions accepted until 5pm CT on June 12. Click here for current RFP info.