The National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF) intends to develop Singapore’s capabilities for research in Systemic Risk and Resilience (SR2). Today’s world of connectivity and global supply chains has produced highly interdependent systems. New vulnerabilities have resulted from increasing interdependencies across sectors, such as energy, food, water systems, global supply chains, communication and financial systems and so on. Singapore is not insulated from these networks and in fact, is a critical node in some of these networks.

The SR2 Initiative aims to grow and strengthen Singapore’s research capabilities and manpower in relevant research areas to better understand risk and enhance resilience. To this end, NRF is pleased to announce grant support for activities that could lead to the development of Proposals for multidisciplinary research projects in Systemic Risk and Resilience. This support will be in the form of project planning grants. The project planning grants provide resources for interested groups to perform the necessary groundwork with the possible outcome of submitting a detailed project proposal to a future grant call.

Collaborations with international experts are encouraged and meetings with such scientists will be supported by the Planning Grants. The call for proposals for Planning Grants commenced on 1 February 2018 and closed on 30 April 2018. A grant call for Full Proposals may be launched in the first half of 2019.

Download application guidelines and application form.

Research Challenges

Proposals could be based on, but need not be limited to, research in the following priority areas:

• Developing frameworks and tools/methodologies for quantification of risk and resilience, including social and behavioural aspects – This refers to the development of tools and methodologies (e.g. modelling and simulation platforms) to model and quantify risk (e.g. infrastructure vulnerabilities) and resilience (e.g. impact of natural disaster on infrastructure, outcomes of the impact and the effects of mitigation actions).

• Understanding interdependencies of systems in highly dense urban environment – This refers to the increasing interdependencies across systems (e.g. energy, food, water systems, global supply chains, communication, financial, etc.) in a highly dense urban environment and how to better understand these interdependencies. 

• Other topics – We invite proposals beyond the first two areas.

Grant Details

The grant support is up to S$150,000 (including 20% indirect costs) for one year. Besides the immediate approach to be supported by the Planning Grant, the proposal must clearly articulate the problem statement and a summary of the approach to be further described in the Full Proposal.. Successful applications will be expected to submit Full Proposals, when the call is launched, or a report detailing why the initial proposed approach is not feasible.

Details of Grant Application

Planning Grant Proposal

The Planning grant will support activities toward the development of a Full Proposal. Activities could include research support (manpower, consumables, etc) to obtain preliminary data, or meetings with international experts for example. The Full Proposal will support collaboration with international researcher(s).

White Paper

To encourage forward thinking, the Planning Grant application will require concise details on what will be further elaborated in the Full Proposal, and must address the following questions:

1. What problem are you trying to address?
2. How is it done today? Who are the leading researchers studying this problem and what is your understanding of the limitations of their current approaches? What is your approach and how does this differ from what others are doing? Why do you think that your proposal will be successful?
3. How are the financial and human resources organised to accomplish your proposed objective? What are the technical risks and how would these be mitigated?
4. What are the roles and contributions of the co-PIs and collaborators? Why are you and your team members particularly qualified to do this? How do the collaborations between the disciplines, institution or with industry add value to the project?
5. What are the scientific milestones / metrics that can be used to measure the success at completion of the Planning Grant and the Full Proposal?
6. What are the potential advances and benefits for society?
7. How will the project be actionable and scalable?

The descriptions of the Planning Grant proposal and the White Paper should not exceed 5 pages (Arial font size 10) in total.

Applicants can expect to be notified by email on the grant call outcome by June 2018.

Eligibility Criteria

Lead and Co-PIs at the point of application must hold a primary full-time appointment in a Singapore publicly funded institution.

Assessment Criteria

Some of the key criteria include:

• Relevance of the application to the aims and scope defined in the call
  • Significance of the problem
  • Development of research capabilities in Singapore

• Quality
  • Scientific excellence
  • Technological novelty

• Impact
  • Potential benefit for scientific breakthroughs or disruption
  • Opportunities to address global challenges
  • Opportunities for translation results
• Implementation
  • Competencies of the research team
  • Complementarity of the expertise of the research team
  • Whether aims and objectives are achievable within the timeframe

For enquiries, please contact Mr Tang Weylin, Deputy Director (Programmes / International Relations) at TANG_Weylin@nrf.gov.sg.