“Grand Challenge” is the formal phrase the research community uses to describe critical research that will help to determine the future. The National Science Foundation (NSF) keeps a running list of grand challenges, and for several years, NSF emphasized the principle of convergence as fundamental to modern research. Today’s grand challenges will not be solved by one discipline alone.

When researchers discover one another and join forces, they expand the possibilities of knowledge we can create, problems we can solve, and the impact we can have on the world.

The University of Pittsburgh’s 2022-23 Annual Report of Research offers examples of civil engineering meeting public health, computer literacy meeting economics and English, nursing meeting artificial intelligence, and Pitt archivists supporting the rich cultural history of horror films and the work of playwright August Wilson.

A proposal developed by a team to win a larger award is different than a proposal by an individual scholar. Our office has developed training to illustrate those differences and show how it’s done right. Pitt’s Big Proposal Bootcamp provides in-depth training for researchers on crafting proposals for large-scale, cross-disciplinary projects. Such a short course is offered by very few research universities. Learn more about how it works in this year’s report.