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Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program (HEGS)

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NSF 21-623

Important information about NSF’s implementation of the revised 2 CFR

NSF Financial Assistance awards (grants and cooperative agreements) made on or after October 1, 2024, will be subject to the applicable set of award conditions, dated October 1, 2024, available on the NSF website. These terms and conditions are consistent with the revised guidance specified in the OMB Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance published in the Federal Register on April 22, 2024.

Important information for proposers

All proposals must be submitted in accordance with the requirements specified in this funding opportunity and in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) that is in effect for the relevant due date to which the proposal is being submitted. It is the responsibility of the proposer to ensure that the proposal meets these requirements. Submitting a proposal prior to a specified deadline does not negate this requirement.

Supports research on the nature, causes and consequences of the spatial dimensions of human activities and/or environmental processes across a range of scales.

Supports research on the nature, causes and consequences of the spatial dimensions of human activities and/or environmental processes across a range of scales.

Synopsis

The objective of the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program is to support basic scientific research about the nature, causes and/or consequences of the spatial distribution of human activity and/or environmental processes across a range of scales. Contemporary geographical research is an arena in which diverse research traditions and methodologies are valid. Recognizing the breadth of the field's contributions to science, the HEGS Program welcomes proposals for empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, and methodologically sophisticated, generalizable research in all sub-fields of geographical and spatial sciences.

Because the National Science Foundation's mandate is to support basic scientific research, the NSF Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences program does not fund research that takes as its primary goal humanistic understanding or applied research. HEGS welcomes proposals that creatively integrate scientific and critical approaches, and that engage rigorous quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods in novel ways. However, a proposal that applies geographical/spatial methods to a social problem but does not propose how that problem provides an opportunity to make a theory-testing and/or theory expanding contributions to geographical science will be returned without review. HEGS supported projects are expected to yield results that will enhance, expand, and transform fundamental geographical theory and methods, and that will have positive broader impacts that benefit society. A proposal to the HEGS Program must also articulate how the results are generalizable beyond the case study. 

It should be noted that HEGS is situated in the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Division of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate at NSF. Therefore, it is critical that research projects submitted to the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program illustrate how the proposed research questions engage human dimensions relevant and important to people and societies. 

A proposal that fails to be responsive to these program expectations will be returned without review.

 

 

Program contacts

General inquiries should be submitted to HEGS-info@nsf.gov

If you are interested in serving as a reviewer or panelist for the HEGS program, please convey your interest in an email message to HEGS-info@nsf.gov.

Jeremy Koster
Program Director
jkoster@nsf.gov (703) 292-8740 SBE/BCS
Tom Evans
Program Director
tevans@nsf.gov (703) 292-4891 SBE/BCS
May Yuan
Program Director
mayuan@nsf.gov (703) 292-2206 SBE/BCS
Cori J. Jacildone
Program Specialist
cjacildo@nsf.gov (703) 292-7388 SBE/BCS

Awards made through this program

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