Department of Justice: Funding for Forensic Laboratories Research and Evaluation, FY 2021

Foreign governments, foreign organizations, and foreign colleges and universities are not eligible to apply. Federal agencies are eligible to apply. (Any award made to a federal agency will be made as an inter-agency reimbursable agreement.)

Applicants must be, or be partnered with, publicly funded forensic science laboratories that are currently accredited by an independent accrediting or certifying forensic science organization. Publicly funded forensic science laboratories include state, regional, county, municipal, and tribal agencies.

To advance Executive Order 13929 Safe Policing for Safe Communities, as of October 28, 2020, the Attorney General determined that all state, local, and university or college law enforcement agencies must be certified by an approved independent credentialing body or have started the certification process to be allocated FY 2021 DOJ discretionary grant funding, as either a recipient or a subrecipient. For detailed information on this new certification requirement, please visit https://cops.usdoj.gov/SafePolicingEO.

All recipients and subrecipients (including any for-profit organization) must forgo any profit or management fee.

The purpose of the CFDA 16.560 (the National Institute of Justice Research, Evaluation, and Development Projects Grants program) is to foster research to develop new knowledge and tools to address the challenges of crime and justice in the United States.

With this solicitation, NIJ seeks proposals for rigorous research and evaluation projects that will:

Identify and inform the forensic community of best practices through the evaluation of existing laboratory protocols.
Have a direct and immediate impact on laboratory efficiency and assist in making laboratory policy decisions.

The intent of this program is to direct the findings of the research and evaluation toward the identification of the most efficient, accurate, reliable, and cost-effective methods for the identification, analysis, and interpretation of physical evidence for criminal justice purposes. Projects should address the challenges and needs of the forensic science community, including but not limited to, the operational needs discussed at the 2020 TWG meeting, which may be found on NIJ.ojp.gov. NIJ’s Forensic Science Technology Working Group (TWG) assists in identifying and prioritizing operational needs and requirements of the field, which are intended to facilitate proposal development. Additional research needs of the forensic science community can be found at the Organization of Scientific Area Committees website.