The U.S. National Science Foundation gives high priority to research that pushes the frontiers of knowledge in science, engineering and education.
While NSF’s foundational support of research commonly results in transformative advances within fields of science or engineering, the agency also explicitly calls for potentially transformative proposals.
This page provides an introduction to transformative research and how NSF supports this type of work.
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NSF uses the definition of transformative research found in the National Science Board’s report, Enhancing Support of Transformative Research at the National Science Foundation:
Transformative research challenges current understanding or provides pathways to new frontiers in science and engineering. It involves ideas, discoveries or tools that do one or both of the following:
- Radically change understanding of an important existing concept in science, engineering or education.
- Lead to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science, engineering or education.
Characteristics of transformative research
Although there is no set formula that produces transformative research, a common refrain is that "you know it when you see it," even if the transformative nature and utility of the research might not be recognized until years later. Some characteristics of transformative research are listed below.
Transformative research can be “high risk, high payoff”
Transformative research often results from a new approach or methodology. Thus, some (but not all) transformative research projects will be viewed as risky.
Transformative research often challenges conventional wisdom
The results of transformative research may be unexpected, difficult to interpret, or may not fit within established models or theories.
Transformative research often blurs disciplinary boundaries
Many (but not all) transformative research projects use interdisciplinary approaches.
- The continental drift model — at first controversial and then proved correct 50 years later based on new analytical methods and sampling of the ocean floor.
- The discovery of metallic glasses, at first an obscure theoretical possibility that eventually made possible the operation of today's integrated circuits.
- The idea that polar ice sheets could serve as neutrino detectors, originally tested in Greenland through an NSF SGER award.
- The discovery of the widespread exchange of genetic information in the environment, both among microbes and between microbes and higher organisms, which alters evolutionary trajectories (such as in the development of disease resistance) and changed researchers' understanding of the tree of life.
- Research into large-scale hypertext web searches, which eventually led to the creation of Google.
- The use of magnetic resonance imaging as a tool for monitoring brain function, which greatly expanded the frontiers of behavioral research.
- The cross-disciplinary coordination of investigations into cognitive simulation and pedagogical techniques that resulted in today's highly effective cognitive tutors.
- The development of the Force Concept Inventory in physics, which set a direction for improvement in education based on measurement of students' deep understanding of scientific concepts.
- Research on Very Large Scale Integration circuit-design methodology that not only led to cell phones, personal data assistants, and supercomputers, but also provided the intellectual framework of abstraction that pervades most of today's computer science.
- The careful refinement of distance measures in the universe, intended to fine-tune cosmological parameters, which instead gave rise to radically new physics and the concept of dark energy.
How to submit a transformative research proposal
1. Apply to any NSF program.
The extent to which a proposed project is potentially transformative is one of the considerations included in NSF's Intellectual Merit review criterion. Reviewers are asked to pay special attention to proposals that include potentially transformative research, and NSF program officers are asked to identify potentially transformative research proposals for funding in all of NSF’s programs.
2. Apply to a program in one of NSF's special investment areas.
The Annual NSF Budget to Congress identifies investment areas that are notable for being interdisciplinary, supported by numerous NSF directorates, and intended to have transformative impact across science and engineering fields. These investment areas may result in a single program or may provide a theme for support in numerous programs.
3. Explore one of NSF's special funding mechanisms.
The EAGER funding mechanism supports exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. This work could be considered especially "high risk, high payoff" in the sense that it involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.
An NSF program officer may recommend that a research grant have its funding extended for up to two years beyond the grant’s initial award period. This Special Creativity Extension allows the grant recipient to pursue adventurous, "high-risk" opportunities in the same general research area as the original grant.
The accomplishment based renewal is a special type of renewal proposal appropriate only for an investigator who has made significant contributions, over a number of years, in the area of research addressed by the proposal. Investigators are strongly urged to contact the cognizant NSF program officer before developing a proposal using this format.