DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA)

Proposers must be one of the following (excluding any personal leaves of absence) by the full proposal deadline listed in Part One: Overview Information:

current Tenure-Track Assistant/Associate Professors;
current Tenured faculty within 3 years of their Tenure date; or an equivalent at a non-profit research institution within 12 years of the receipt of their Ph.D.

All proposers must be employed at a U.S. Institution.

Previous YFA Award recipients are not eligible for this or any future YFA program.

Former DARPA Program Managers are not eligible to apply for funding under this program.

Researchers working at Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, DoD and other Government Laboratories are not eligible to apply as PIs for funding under this program, however they may be proposed as subs – please see Section VIII.B on teaming in DARPA-RA-17-01.

Non-U.S. individuals may participate to the extent that such participants comply with any necessary nondisclosure agreements, security regulations, export control laws, and other governing statutes applicable under the circumstances. See Section III.A for more information.

At the executive summary phase, proposing PIs are limited to one executive summary per TA; at the full proposal phase, proposing PIs are limited to submitting only one full proposal to only one topic under this RA. Submitting more than one full proposal may result in all of the PI’s proposal submissions being determined non-conforming and being removed from award consideration. A proposer is strongly encouraged to submit an executive summary in advance of a full proposal to determine DARPA’s interest and minimize the effort and expense of preparing an out of scope proposal.

Recipients of non-YFA DARPA awards are eligible to propose. Proposers must provide a listing of federal support (past, current, and pending). This list must include the sponsor, amount, and performance dates of all federally-funded research efforts and should be present on the submission cover sheet as indicated in Section IV.

There is no limit to the number of applications that can be submitted by an institution; however each submission must have a single principal investigator. Submissions to young investigator programs sponsored by other agencies are not restricted.