What this program funds
MURI funds large, five-year team efforts in basic science on topics the Department of Defense selects each year. The program is run through the three service research offices — the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Army Research Office — and each year's announcement lists a few dozen specific topics, each written and owned by a program officer. The bet behind MURI is that some basic-research problems only crack when several disciplines attack them together, at a funding scale no single-PI grant provides.
Eligibility in plain English
- Awards go to U.S. institutions of higher education; a lead university holds the award, with partner universities joining by subaward.
- Teams are genuinely multidisciplinary and usually multi-institutional — a PI plus several co-PIs whose fields jointly cover the topic.
- Your proposal must respond to a specific topic in that year's announcement; there is no open category.
- MURI is not career-stage-limited, but the scale favors investigators with the track record to run a distributed team.
- Team-composition and institutional rules vary by topic and service — confirm with your sponsored-programs office and the current announcement.
What you'll need to submit
- White paper (recommended, and effectively expected) — a short concept document the topic chief uses to give feedback before full proposals.
- Full proposal — the integrated research plan across all thrusts and institutions, with a management plan for coordinating the team.
- Budgets and Budget Justifications for the lead institution and every subawardee, for the base period and option years.
- Biographical sketches and current-and-pending support for the full PI/co-PI team.
- Institutional paperwork for a multi-university federal contract or grant — representations, certifications, and subaward commitments.
Tips for this mechanism
- Answer the topic as written, and talk to its topic chief. Each MURI topic encodes a specific program officer's scientific agenda, with a named contact. A white-paper conversation tells you whether your angle is what they want — retrofitting your existing research program onto a topic rarely survives review.
- Integration is the review criterion that kills stapled teams. A MURI that reads as five parallel single-PI projects loses to one whose thrusts visibly depend on each other. Design cross-institution tasks, shared milestones, and joint students into the plan.
- Use the white-paper stage honestly. Feedback at that stage is candid; a lukewarm response is a signal to skip this year's cycle rather than sink two months into a full proposal.
- Start the multi-institution logistics early. Five subaward budgets, data-sharing terms, and a credible management plan take longer than the science narrative. The teams that scramble in the last two weeks show it.
Related programs
- DoD DURIP (equipment funding that often accompanies MURI-scale efforts)
- Core basic-research programs at ONR, AFOSR, and ARO (single-PI scale)
- DEPSCoR (DoD research capacity funding for eligible states)
- NSF center-scale programs for team science without the defense framing