Understanding the Rules of Life Program: Scientific Advancements and Future Opportunities (2023)
Chapter: Understanding the Rules of Life (URoL) Program Activities and Impact
URoL Program Activities and Impact
The URoL program is one of the 10 “Big Ideas” that NSF unveiled in 2016. The Big Ideas are bold, long-term research and process ideas that provide unique opportunities to position our nation at the cutting edge of global science and engineering through multidisciplinary research. A fundamental goal of the URoL program is to identify the causal predictive relationships that could be “rules of life,” but the program also seeks to train the next generation of researchers to work across scales and scientific disciplines and to foster convergent research. An ultimate goal is to provide the capacity to approach more complex questions than ever before.
To meet this vision, NSF funded projects involving multidisciplinary teams and addressing fundamental questions in a variety of living systems and organisms. As of May 2023, NSF has awarded funding to more than 100 principal investigators (PIs) on more than 60 projects at institutions across the United States (see URoL By the Numbers). NSF issued six program announcements to support research to build a synthetic cell, study microbiomes and emergent networks, study epigenetics, and to look at how the rules of life could be applied to societal challenges (see Program Timeline).
URoL Program Goals
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To enable discoveries that will allow us to better understand such interactions and identify causal, predictive relationships across these scales—so called “rules” for how life functions. |
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To provide us with the capacity to approach more complex questions than ever before. |
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To train the next generation of researchers to approach scientific inquiry in a new way that crosses scales and scientific disciplines. |
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To foster collaboration and convergent research to consider multiple levels of organization and complexity in addressing key questions in the life sciences. |
Diversity of Institutions Involved in the Understanding the Rules of Life Program
Since 2016, more than 100 principal investigators were awarded funding to identify generalizable rules that govern biological systems at micro and macro levels.
