21st Annual P3 Awards: A National Student Design Competition Focusing on People, Prosperity and the Planet | EPA G2024 P3 Q4

Opportunity Information: Apply for EPA G2024 P3 Q4

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is offering funding through its 21st Annual P3 Awards, a national student design competition centered on "People, Prosperity and the Planet." This opportunity is built around the idea that students can take what they are learning in the classroom and turn it into practical, real-world solutions that can be designed, tested, and demonstrated in their own communities. The competition is designed to support interdisciplinary student teams, meaning proposals are expected to draw on multiple fields (for example, engineering, environmental science, public health, chemistry, data science, policy, and related disciplines) to produce a tangible project rather than only a theoretical study.

A major focus of this particular announcement is chemical safety and the broader challenge of understanding, evaluating, and reducing risks from chemical use and disposal. EPA highlights the need for better ways to predict impacts and to equip states, industries, and decision-makers with data, tools, and methods that allow faster and more informed decisions across the thousands of chemicals used in the United States. In practice, the agency is looking for projects that either advance research or demonstrate innovative, cost-effective approaches to addressing chemical safety problems, especially approaches that reduce chemical risks and improve the ability to assess exposure and toxicity.

The types of projects EPA signals interest in include technologies and methods that improve how chemical data is collected, organized, managed, and shared. This includes strategies that reduce or replace animal testing, which reflects a growing push toward alternative testing approaches such as in vitro methods, computational toxicology, read-across approaches, and other evidence-based techniques that can speed evaluation while reducing reliance on animals. EPA also points to the value of tools that help determine whether new approaches are feasible and scalable, which suggests a strong preference for proposals that do more than propose an idea, instead showing how it can be implemented, validated, and used in realistic settings.

Another highlighted area is information technology and software development, specifically tools that can mine and interpret rapidly expanding data sources related to chemical exposures and toxicities. That can include data integration platforms, automated literature or database mining, exposure modeling, decision-support dashboards, machine learning approaches for toxicity prediction, or other digital tools that help translate large, messy datasets into usable insights for regulators, researchers, and practitioners. Across all these topics, innovation is emphasized as a central theme, so competitive proposals will likely show a clear "new" angle, whether that is a novel technical approach, a new application of existing methods, or a creative way to deploy solutions at community scale.

Administratively, this is a discretionary grant opportunity from the EPA (CFDA 66.516) under Funding Opportunity Number EPA G2024 P3 Q4. The listed award ceiling is $75,000 per award, and EPA expects to make about 16 awards under this announcement. The original closing date is February 21, 2024. Eligibility is not fully spelled out in the excerpt provided, but it indicates that eligibility requirements are detailed in Section III of the official Notice of Funding Opportunity, and the eligible applicant category is broadly labeled as "Others," which typically means applicants should rely on the NOFO for the precise institutional and team eligibility rules specific to the P3 student competition.

Overall, this opportunity is best understood as a student-driven design and demonstration program where EPA funds hands-on projects that tackle environmental and public health challenges tied to chemical safety. Strong applications will likely combine technical merit with real-world practicality, showing a clear plan to design, build or prototype, and demonstrate a solution that could be used beyond the classroom, while also aligning with EPA priorities like better chemical data systems, alternatives to animal testing, and modern software tools for exposure and toxicity analysis.

• The Environmental Protection Agency in the environment sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "21st Annual P3 Awards: A National Student Design Competition Focusing on People, Prosperity and the Planet" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 66.516.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2023-12-22.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-02-21. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $75,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 16 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for EPA G2024 P3 Q4

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