The Future Can Hardly Wait

Grand Challenges are problems of global, national and regional significance that require researchers to work together across disciplinary boundaries to develop and implement solutions. Grand Challenges address problems that, when solved, have a significant positive impact on people and society. These challenges are large in scale, ambitious in scope, and multi-disciplinary. They have carefully developed goals that enable multiple paths towards solutions, and that are relevant across varied disciplines and communities.

UNM will select three Grand Challenge Conceptual Goals (two led by UNM Main Campus, and one led by UNM Health Sciences Center), and will fund research planning grants for each.

The University of New Mexico invites teams of UNM researchers to propose Grand Challenge (GC) Conceptual Goals, and to serve as conveners for further development of these goals. Following the selection of the three UNM Grand Challenge Conceptual Goals, scoping workshops will be held to help GC proposal teams, including partners, to develop detailed research project plans. Planning grants of $70,000 will be awarded to each of these three teams based on their research plans. Teams will (i) work collaboratively with the UNM administration to develop compelling proposals for internal seed funding over the next few years (FY20-24), (ii) develop milestones for the GC Goal over this period, and (iii) use seed funding to develop strategic targets and prepare successful applications for extramural funding.

Submit your GC proposal as a single document with file name: GC [keyword]_[lead convener last name] to: grandchallenges@unm.edu by 11:59 pm January 17^th, 2019.