Background.  The Office of Science Notice 07-15, Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR); Building EPSCoR-State/National Laboratory Partnerships provides approximately for up to ten new awards in FY 2008. The requested FY 2008 budget contains full funding for the DOE EPSCoR program ($8.2M) where approximately $1.0 to $1.5 million will be designated to new EPSCoR-State/National Laboratory Partnership Awards. All full applications submitted in response to Notice 07-15 that are not funded in FY 2008 will be held in consideration for possible funding in FY 2009 at approximately the FY 2008 level. Awards for FY 2008 will be made only after the funds that are requested for this activity are appropriated by Congress.

A breakdown by basic/applied research category relative to program office is given in the table below. DOE EPSCoR received 80 full proposals by the deadline of July 16, 2007. The formal proposals will be externally peer reviewed according to well-established guidelines. Awards will be announced in November 2007 for FY 2008 funding.

DOE EPSCoR received 197 pre-applications in response to FY 2007 Office of Science Notice 07-15, Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR); Building EPSCoR-State/National Laboratory Partnerships. Each of these submissions was independently reviewed by at least three DOE program managers and two National Laboratory managers and ranked as (high, medium, or low). The DOE EPSCoR program strives to engage other programs within the Department of Energy by encouraging participation by program managers from other program offices in the pre-application review process, and co-funding of the successful full proposals. Two criteria were used in this pre-application review process: i) whether the proposed activities represented DOE Research, and ii) whether the proposed research was responsive to the specific research goals described in the Notice. Based on the recommendations of DOE program mangers, principal investigators of 80 submissions have been encouraged to submit full proposals. A breakdown of pre-applications submitted by state is as follows: Alabama 13, Alaska 10, Arkansas 6, Delaware 6, Idaho 14, Kansas 4, Kentucky 2, Louisiana 14, Maine 1, Mississippi 2, Montana 2, Nebraska 12, Nevada 7 ,New Hampshire 5, New Mexico 12, North Dakota 2, Oklahoma 9, Puerto Rico 2, Rhode Island 1, South Carolina 29, South Dakota  11, Vermont 3, West Virginia 25, Wyoming 5. There is no appeal process for discouraged pre-applications, nor is there any additional guidance/information that we can provide regarding discouragements. According to the rules set forth in the Notices, discouraged pre-applications cannot be used to submit full proposals. Email messages informing the principal investigator of the encouragement or discouragement of a full proposal were sent prior to June 8, 2007.