The Department of Defense (DoD) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) is a research program that addresses high-risk basic research and attempts to understand or achieve something that has never been done before. The program is sponsored by the DoD research offices, including the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The program aims to make contributions to current and future needs of both the DoD and the larger scientific ecosystem. The MURI program complements the Department’s single-investigator basic research grants and aims to fund teams of investigators with the hope that collective insights from multiple disciplines could facilitate the cutting-edge basic research required to address the Department’s unique problem sets. Some of the research topics include: • Characterization and Modeling of the Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere • Ethical Constructs and Adaptive Learning Systems • Structured Light for High Field, High Intensity Laser-Matter Interactions • Optics with Dynamically Reconfigureable Arrays of Molecules and Atoms (OhDRAMA) • 2D/3D Heterostructures via Remote Epitaxy • Fungalphabet: Deciphering the Hidden Language of Fungal Networks for Environmental Intelligence • Evolving Chemistry and Biology to Degrade Polymers with Stable Chemical Bonds • Space-time Metamaterials for Multi-dimensional Wave Transformation • Altermagnetic Topology • Ontology Engineering for Machine Learning in Open-ended Sensor, Model, User Systems • Entanglement Engineering with Holographic Duality • Curved Electromagnetic Propagation • Optimized Photonic Inference Systems • Evaluation and Monitoring of Large-Scale Generative AI • Brain-inspired Large Neural Models for Intelligent Robots • Reading between the lines: Connecting Deep Ocean Currents & Bedform Morphology • Impacts of Aerosol Injection, Evolution, and Deposition on 3D Radiative Balance • Interfacial Thermal Energy Transduction • Inherent stability in hybrid metal halide perovskite semiconductors through understanding of in situ electrochemistry • Visual Perception and Attention for Real-Virtual Hybrid Environments • Continuous Improvement and Assessment to Achieve Autonomous Skilled Performance • Gas/Material Interactions for Ultra-high-temperature Materials in Hypersonic Flows Eligible applicants include U.S. institutions of higher education with degree-granting programs in science and/or engineering. Awards will take the form of grants, with an estimated total funding of $170 million over five years. Typical annual funding per grant is up to $1.5M.