Edison-driven survey of funding venues for a larger-scale tensegrity / BO grant

[Copilot]

Use Edison to scope federal/quasi-federal funding venues for a multi-year follow-on to the BYU MRG tensegrity + Bayesian-optimization energy-absorption framework, accounting for Hill (ex-Sandia, tensegrity / smart structures) and Baird (BO / SDL / Honegumi, 2025– assistant prof) backgrounds and the application thrusts in #16 (NASA aerospace) and #18 (crutch-tip impact absorber). Optimizing for venue fit, not deadline.

Changes

• edison-responses/2026-05-09-funding-venues-literature-ff9cb91e.{md,json} — initial LITERATURE scoping (~32 KB). Surfaces NSF Convergence Accelerator, NASA NIAC + STMD pathways, and DoD DURIP as concrete leads; gives basic-science framing hooks (rate-dependent TPU constitutive modeling, instability-mediated absorption in prestressed networks, multifidelity BO) and a 12–18-month action plan. Self-flags narrow source coverage and lists exactly which evidence the follow-up needs to retrieve.
• edison-responses/2026-05-09-funding-venues-literature-high-5c3afc89.{md,json} — LITERATURE_HIGH follow-up (~66 KB) prompted directly against those gaps. Agency-by-agency program tables (NSF CMMI/DMREF/CAREER, DOE BES/EERE/ARPA-E, NIH NIBIB/NICHD/NIA/NIOSH, NASA STMD/NIAC/STRI/EPSCoR, DoD DARPA/ARO/ONR/AFOSR/CDMRP/DURIP, DOT/NIST/FDA, foundations), prior-tensegrity-award table, ranked Hill+Baird-led primary shortlist, Sterling-led early-career shortlist with eligibility-window checks (CAREER, YIP, YFA, ECF, DOE Early Career), framing guidance per top venue, don't-apply flags, and a preparatory action plan.
• edison-responses/2026-05-09-funding-program-officers-literature-high-c668cd19.{md,json} — LITERATURE_HIGH follow-up (~52 KB) targeting named program officers / managers + contact info / outreach norms for the 26 venues across the prior shortlists. Confirms named POCs with citations for the highest-confidence outreach leads (Linkan Bian @ NSF Advanced Manufacturing; John C. Nelson and Gary A. Fleming @ NASA NIAC; Dr. James Joseph @ ARO Mechanical Sciences; Dr. Martina Barnas @ ONR Code 33; M. Qidwai @ NSF CMMI MoMS), each with PO research-interest blurbs, agency-published email-format patterns, cycle-timing guidance (cold-email vs. white-paper-first vs. nomination-only), and a tuned 2–3-sentence first-contact ask. Honestly flags ~17 of 26 venues (NSF DMREF/LEAP-HI/Convergence Accelerator, NASA STMD ESI/ECF appendix POCs, NIH NIBIB/NCMRR/NIA/NIOSH, DOE Early Career BES, DARPA YFA + DSO, AFOSR YIP + RTA1, CDMRP/DURIP, DOT UTC, NIST MML, FDA OSEL, Sloan) as not confirmable from the literature alone, with the specific agency URL the team should use to verify each before sending outreach.
• edison-responses/README.md — index of Edison artifacts under this directory and the repo convention: commit both verbatim formatted_answer (.md) and full task.model_dump_json() (.json) per task. Documents the edison-client 0.12.0 quirk that the API key is read from EDISON_PLATFORM_API_KEY (not EDISON_API_KEY).

No code, LaTeX, or build changes — picking a target venue, contacting the identified program officers, and revising the proposal toward the chosen venue are natural follow-ups.

[sgbaird-yolo]

@copilot you timed out. Pick up from where you left off . Identify program officers and the contact information that would be good to reach out to related to program fit and interest.

[Copilot]

@copilot you timed out. Pick up from where you left off . Identify program officers and the contact information that would be good to reach out to related to program fit and interest.

Picked up where I left off. Submitted a focused Edison LITERATURE_HIGH query (task c668cd19-7e74-41de-8863-e69c37348e8b) targeting program officers + contact info / outreach norms for the venues shortlisted in the prior runs; results are committed in 17a768f at edison-responses/2026-05-09-funding-program-officers-literature-high-c668cd19.{md,json} (and the index README is updated).

Highest-confidence immediate-outreach leads from the response (each with a citation in the .md):

• NSF Advanced Manufacturing (CMMI) — Linkan Bian (verified via NIST AMS 100-72, 2025).
• NASA NIAC — John C. Nelson (Program Executive) and Gary A. Fleming (Program Element Manager), verified via Turner et al., AIAA AVIATION FORUM 2025.
• ARO Mechanical Sciences — Dr. James Joseph.
• ONR Code 33 — Dr. Martina Barnas.
• NSF CMMI MoMS — M. Qidwai (verify on NSF staff directory before contact).

Each venue entry also includes outreach norms (cold-email vs. white-paper-first vs. nomination-only), cycle timing, PO research-interest blurbs, and a tuned 2–3-sentence first-contact ask. The response is honest about the ~17 of 26 venues for which it could not confirm a current named PO from the literature alone; for each of those, it points at the specific agency URL the team can use to verify (NSF/NASA/NIH/DARPA/AFOSR/CDMRP/DURIP/DOT-UTC/NIST-MML/FDA-OSEL/Sloan staff pages).