The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has renewed a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to support Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction (C-WMD) advances. DTRA seeks to identify, adopt, and adapt emerging, existing and revolutionary sciences that may demonstrate high payoff potential to C-WMD threats. Areas of specific interest include:
- WMD sensing and recognition
- Biological and chemical countermeasures or filtering
- Defenses to non-traditional agents and threats
- Innovative robotics for countering WMD
- Detecting, identifying and charactizing origin and spread of CBRNE agents
- Methods to measure and assess the effects of WMD
- Novel decontamination principles and technology
- Shielding of systems or networks from WMD
- Improve energetic materials for use against WMD facilities or systems
- Deep penetration technology to deny the adversary sanctuary of WMD
- Modeling of counter-WMD munitions
- Simulations of in-theater scenarious with accurate lethality calculations
- Advancements in support of arms control
- Environmentally responsible processes for disposing CBRNE material
- Science to enhance monitoring, compliance and verification technologies
- International collaborations to detect, characterize, and report WMD
Grants under the program will generally average $150K to $500K per year, depending on the type of award, and are limited to academic organizations or industry and not-for-profit research with at least a 30% contribution by one or more universities. A portion of the funding effort is expected to be devoted to awards for science, technology, engineering and mathematics education programs with a C-WMD focus; such as, but not limited to postdoctoral fellowships, stipends, degrees, visiting scientist programs, student exchange programs, and development of accredited C-WMD curricula.
This BAA has been in effect since 2009 and will continue until 2014 with annual renewal notices. Evaluations of submissions under this BAA are conducted in two phases. Phase I is for receipt and evaluation of pre-application white papers in direct response to a published topic or by invitation based on the assessment of the idea by the program’s Technical POC. Phase II is for receipt and evaluation of invited proposal applications. Invitation to the Phase II is based on the evaluation results of the Phase I white paper.
The next window for Phase I proposal submission ends 1 March 2012, with the second and final window for FY2012 closing 2 July 2012. The official solicitation HDTRA1-09-14-FRCWMD-BAA is available here.
