Funding Opportunity Announcement - STEWARDSHIP SCIENCE ACADEMIC ALLIANCES (SSAA)

The U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA), Defense Programs Office of Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation is soliciting applications for the Stewardship Science Academic Alliances (SSAA) Program. Since 1992, the United States has observed the moratorium on underground nuclear testing while significantly decreasing the size of its nuclear arsenal. National Policy required NNSA and its weapons laboratories to institute the science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) to ensure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the stockpile, while allowing the country to pursue a variety of nonproliferation and disarmament goals. The SSP combines sophisticated experiments, highly accurate physics modeling, and improved computational power to simulate and predict nuclear weapon performance over a wide range of conditions and scenarios. The SSAA Program was established in 2002 to support state-of-the-art research at U.S. academic institutions in areas of fundamental physical science and technology of relevance to the SSP mission. The SSAA Program provides the research experience necessary to maintain a cadre of trained scientists at U.S. universities to meet the nation's current and future SSP needs, with a focus on those areas not supported by other federal agencies. It supports the DOE/NNSA's priorities both to address the workforce specific needs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and to support the next generation of professionals who will meet those needs. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is announcing DOE/NNSA's interest in receiving applications for new or renewal financial assistance awards for research grants in the Stewardship Science Academic Alliances (SSAA) Program. The research areas of interest in the SSAA Program for this announcement are: properties of materials under extreme conditions and/or hydrodynamics (condensed matter physics and materials science, and fluid dynamics); low energy nuclear science; and radiochemistry.