DOE Early Career Research Program — ASCR Track

DOE Early Career Research Program — ASCR Track

Supports grants for early career academic and lab researchers in advanced computing quantum and applied mathematics.

⚠ This may reflect a past cycle — verify the current call on the funder's site.

The DOE Early Career Research Program FY2026 ASCR Track (FOA DE-FOA-0003602) is a five-year grant program administered by the DOE Office of Science through the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program office, targeting early-career researchers working in advanced computing, applied mathematics, quantum information science, and artificial intelligence and machine learning for scientific applications. ASCR is one of seven DOE Office of Science offices participating in the cross-office FY2026 Early Career program, which has a total planned funding of up to $145 million, with $79 million awarded in FY2026. The program is designed to develop the next generation of scientific leadership in DOE mission-critical disciplines by providing sustained multi-year research support during the most vulnerable phase of an academic or laboratory career.

Award amounts differ significantly by institutional affiliation. Untenured tenure-track assistant or associate professors at U.S. academic institutions receive approximately $875,000 over five years (roughly $175,000 per year). Full-time employees at DOE National Laboratories or DOE Office of Science User Facilities receive approximately $2,750,000 over five years (roughly $550,000 per year). Both tracks require that the researcher be within 10 years of their PhD at the time of application. The FY2026 timeline was sequential: a mandatory pre-application was due March 24, 2026, and only researchers who received encouragement from that pre-application review were eligible to submit a full proposal, with the full application deadline of June 2, 2026. For-profit companies, nonprofits not affiliated with a U.S. university, and unaffiliated individual researchers are not eligible.

Successful ASCR-track proposals typically demonstrate a clearly defined research agenda in high-performance computing, exascale applications, applied mathematics, or quantum algorithms that directly advances DOE's scientific mission. Given that ASCR operates two national leadership computing facilities — the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) — proposals that articulate specific plans to leverage leadership-class computing resources are particularly competitive. Applicants submit through the PAMS system and must be sponsored by an eligible institution; the full FOA PDF contains page limits, scoring rubric, and specific ASCR priority topic areas.