Young Faculty Award (YFA) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) Young Faculty Award (YFA) is a discretionary grant opportunity designed to bring newly appointed university faculty into DARPA's research ecosystem and to surface bold, unconventional ideas that could shape future defense-relevant technology directions. The program is structured as a front-end "on-ramp" for early-career investigators, giving them a way to propose and validate disruptive concepts that, if successful, could later grow into the foundation for a larger, full-scale DARPA program released under a future Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). In other words, the YFA is meant to generate proof-of-concept results and strong technical narratives around problems that matter at scale, rather than supporting incremental extensions of existing work.

The solicitation calls for single-author proposals centered on concept development and validation within one (or a combination) of five MTO thrust areas: electronics, photonics, micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), architectures, and algorithms. Applicants must choose a thrust area and clearly label it on the proposal cover page. Across these thrusts, DARPA is looking for research that enables revolutionary advances, particularly breakthroughs tied to underlying physics, new materials, or novel device concepts. The announcement explicitly encourages speculative, high-risk ideas, which is consistent with DARPA's broader interest in exploring technical approaches that have significant upside even if the path to success is uncertain.

A strong YFA submission is expected to be sharply framed and milestone-driven. Proposals should clearly define the problem being tackled, lay out the proposed solution approach, and specify the critical milestones that will be achieved during the award. DARPA allows the overall problem statement to be broader than the initial work plan, but it requires a clear explanation of how the near-term effort connects to that bigger challenge. The first phase of research is expected to focus on a well-defined question that can be meaningfully addressed in roughly 12 to 18 months through rigorous analysis, design work, or experimental exploration. The intent is that the early results serve as credible validation of the concept, de-risk key assumptions, and demonstrate enough promise to justify a follow-on DARPA effort at a much larger scale.

The opportunity is limited to "young investigators" as defined in the eligibility requirements of the full Research Announcement, and it is open to applicants at U.S. institutions of higher education, including both private universities and public/state-controlled universities. The funding instrument is a grant, and there is no cost sharing or matching requirement listed. The public listing shows an award ceiling and floor of $0, which typically indicates that funding amounts are specified in the full announcement rather than in the summary fields of the posting.

Key dates from the announcement include an abstract deadline of October 25, 2007 (4:00 p.m. Eastern Time) and a full proposal deadline of January 10, 2008 (4:00 p.m. Eastern Time). The funding opportunity number is RA07-44, and the CFDA number associated with it is 12.910 (Research and Technology Development). The posting date is September 14, 2007, with an archive date of September 19, 2008. For official solicitation materials and related MTO opportunities, the announcement references "MTO Solicitations," and it lists Thomas Kenny, Ph.D., DARPA/MTO, as the point of contact for access issues related to the full announcement.

Overall, the YFA is best understood as a DARPA entry point for early-career faculty with ambitious ideas that are not just new, but potentially field-changing. It rewards proposals that take a clear swing at a high-impact technical barrier, define measurable milestones, and produce a convincing early demonstration that could scale into a future DARPA program, while explicitly ruling out work that mainly delivers evolutionary improvements over the existing state of practice.

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