Environmental Engineering

About This Grant

In broadest terms, the field of Environmental Engineering is concerned with understanding the impacts of human activities on the public health, natural environmental quality, and natural resources and with developing the scientific basis for identifying, analyzing, solving, mitigating, or managing environmental problems caused by human activities. The field emerged as a separate engineering discipline during the middle third of the 20th century in response to widespread public concern about water and air pollution and increasingly extensive environmental quality degradation. However, its roots extend back to early efforts in public health engineering in the late 19th century, and to ancient times with regard to urban drinking water systems.The Environmental Engineering program supports fundamental research and educational activities across the broad field it serves. The goal of this program is to encourage transformative research which applies scientific principles to minimize solid, liquid, and gaseous discharges into land, inland and coastal waters, and air that result from human activity, and to evaluate adverse impacts of these discharges on human health and environmental quality. The program fosters cutting-edge scientific research based on fundamental science for identifying, evaluating, and developing new methods and technologies for assessing the waste assimilative capacity of the natural environment and for removing or reducing conventional and emerging contaminants from polluted air, water and soils. The program is based on four types of engineering tools - - measurement, analysis, synthesis, and design.Major areas of interest and activity in the program include: * Developing innovative biological, chemical, and physical treatment processes to remove and degrade pollutants from water and air * Measuring, modeling, and predicting the movement and fate of pollutants in the environment * Developing and evaluating techniques to clean up polluted sites by preserving and enhancing the self-purification ability or waste assimilative capacity of natural environmental systems, such as landfills and contaminated aquifers; restoring the quality of polluted water, air, and land resources, and rehabilitating degraded ecosystems. Along with its sibling environmental programs (Energy for Sustainability, Environmental Implications of Emerging Technologies, and Environmental Sustainability), the program fosters environmental sustainability through pollution control and resource management/conservation, and development of techniques to minimize or avoid generating pollution. Research may be directed toward improving the cost-effectiveness of pollution avoidance, as well as developing new principles for pollution avoidance technologies. Research for new and improved sensors of environmental conditions and innovative waste reduction and recycling processes also are important components of this program.The duration of unsolicited awards is generally one to three years. The average annual award size for the program is $100,000. Small equipment proposals of less than $100,000 will also be considered and may be submitted during these windows. Any proposal received outside the announced dates will be returned without review.The duration of CAREER awards is five years. The submission deadline for Engineering CAREER proposals is in July every year. Please see the following URL for more information: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08051/nsf08051.jsp.Proposals for Conferences, Workshops, and Supplements may be submitted at any time, but must be discussed with the program director before submission.Grants for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) and EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) replace the SGER program. Please note that proposals of these types must be discussed with the program director before submission. Further details are available in the PAPPG download, available below. Please refer to the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG), January 2009, (NSF 09-1) when you prepare your proposal.