Assembling, Visualizing, and Analyzing the Tree of Life | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funding opportunity "Assembling, Visualizing, and Analyzing the Tree of Life" (AVAToL; NSF Publication 11-534) is a discretionary grant program in the Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) aimed at pushing phylogenetics beyond separate, well-studied branches and toward a more unified, integrated tree spanning all life. Building on decades of progress since Darwin's "descent with modification" and on NSF's earlier Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) program, AVAToL focuses on the next major bottleneck: synthesizing many partial phylogenies into a cohesive framework while also creating substantially better ways to visualize, query, and analyze an evolving, data-rich "dynamic" tree of life. The program frames this as a major scientific and technical challenge that will require conceptual leaps, potentially new kinds of characters and data, large-scale data gathering, and more powerful analytic and visualization methods than what is typically used in standard phylogenetic workflows.

A defining feature of AVAToL is that it is organized around an NSF "Ideas Lab" process rather than the traditional single-team proposal pathway. Applicants first submit a preliminary proposal in order to be considered for participation in an intensive five-day residential workshop (scheduled for August 22-26, 2011 in this solicitation). During that workshop, participants develop project concepts in real time, receive iterative feedback, and form new multidisciplinary teams on the spot. Only proposals that are invited as a result of the Ideas Lab process are eligible to be submitted as full proposals, and only invited full proposals are considered for funding. In other words, participation in the Ideas Lab is the gateway to eligibility for funding in this particular opportunity, and the program is explicitly designed to create new collaborations and high-risk, high-reward project directions that might not emerge through conventional proposal development.

Scientifically, the solicitation emphasizes two tightly linked outcomes: (1) transformative approaches to building a more integrated and robust tree of life that can reconcile and synthesize disparate phylogenetic efforts, and (2) novel tools and methods for visualization and analysis that make the resulting tree usable as a living research infrastructure. The opportunity highlights needs such as better algorithms and models, improved computational and statistical methods for inference and synthesis, scalable data pipelines, and interactive visualization systems that let researchers explore the tree, interrogate evidence, and update relationships as new data arrive. The intent is not just to add more branches to the tree, but to enable deeper integration, improved confidence and robustness, and genuinely new ways to work with tree-of-life knowledge as it grows.

Because the problems are framed as inherently cross-cutting, AVAToL strongly encourages applications from a wide range of disciplines. Alongside systematists and phylogeneticists, the NSF explicitly calls out potential contributions from mathematicians and computer scientists (for algorithms and formal models), bioinformaticians and genomicists (for pipelines and new molecular characters), morphologists and paleontologists (for phenotypic and fossil evidence that can anchor evolutionary hypotheses), statisticians (for inference frameworks and uncertainty quantification), educators (to help train the next generation of researchers in these integrated methods), and even artists or others interested in advancing visualization and interactive interfaces. The common thread is an emphasis on integrative, collaborative work that depends on sustained communication among people who do not typically share the same research toolbox.

In terms of funding details, NSF anticipated making about six awards, with an estimated total program budget of $12,000,000. Individual awards were expected to fall between $300,000 (floor) and $2,000,000 (ceiling). The funding instrument is a grant, and the solicitation includes a cost sharing or matching requirement. Eligibility is listed as unrestricted (open to any type of entity), subject to any clarifications in the full text of the announcement. Key dates in this solicitation included an original posting date of March 11, 2011; a preliminary proposal deadline of May 10, 2011 (required for Ideas Lab consideration); and a full proposal deadline of November 4, 2011 for invited proposals only.

Practical contact information in the notice points applicants to NSF's Grants.gov support channel for access issues (grantsgovsupport@nsf.gov), and the official source document is identified as NSF Publication 11-534. Overall, AVAToL is best read as an NSF attempt to catalyze a step change in how the scientific community constructs and uses the tree of life: not only improving the underlying phylogenetic synthesis across organisms, but also building the computational, statistical, and visualization infrastructure needed to explore that synthesis at scale and keep it responsive to continual scientific discovery.

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