NNSA Stewardship Science Academic Alliances (SSAA)

NNSA Stewardship Science Academic Alliances is the National Nuclear Security Administration's academic research program for stewardship science. It funds university work tied to stockpile stewardship questions and reaches about 80 universities while training roughly 350 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs each year. The program uses grants and supports two award types: Individual Investigator Awards and Centers of Excellence. In April 2023, the PI award round covered $21 million across 36 grants, and the 2023 Centers of Excellence round announced $100 million. That cadence points to individual investigator calls every few years and center calls on a longer horizon, which suits groups that can build sustained stewardship-science capacity over time. SSAA favors academic teams working on material properties under extreme conditions, hydrodynamics, low-energy nuclear science, radiochemistry, and high-energy-density physics. The strongest proposals are tightly aligned to stewardship-science questions and, for center calls, built around multi-institutional collaboration rather than a single-lab effort. That mix makes the program valuable to universities with serious stewardship-science groups and the infrastructure to support long-running experimental and modeling teams.

No upcoming rounds verified. Cadence: Triennial.