Building the future, atom by atom — NSF deploys $108M for materials science at 6 research centers

The U.S. National Science Foundation is pushing materials science beyond the state-of-the-art with an investment of $108 million in six advanced research centers. The centers will explore a broad range of scientific frontiers, such as exotic materials where light and matter are effectively fused together as hybrid particles, and soft materials that can potentially deliver medicines precisely within the human body.

Each center will receive $18 million over six years from the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers program. NSF has supported such centers since the 1970s when they were called the Materials Research Labs. Renamed as the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers in the 1990s, they are a discovery powerhouse for the U.S. The centers have collectively produced tens of thousands of published scientific findings, resulting in new and improved materials found in everything from dental fillings to rocket engines.

"For more than fifty years, NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers have helped put America at the forefront of advanced materials discovery," says NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate Head Tie Luo. "These centers will continue to explore the practically infinite number of ways that matter can be formed into materials, bridging the gap between what we can imagine and what we can create."

NSF has selected these centers to cast a wide scientific net of experimental and theoretical research. For example, one center is focusing on creating more sensitive types of scintillators, a type of material that glows or "scintillates" with visible light when struck with X-rays. Scintillators are a key component in CT scanning machines that allow doctors to detect cancer and other conditions. Incorporating new materials into scintillators to manipulate light at the nanoscale could enable highly detailed medical images that require substantially less X-ray exposure. For children undergoing cancer screening and treatment, that could dramatically reduce the potential harm of repeated exposure to X-rays.

Other centers will pursue research in completely different areas, including:

• Building autonomous AI-based experimentation labs to design new soft materials that could be used for drug delivery and other medical therapies.
• Hybrid quantum metamaterials that are effectively made of both light and matter.
• And other areas of foundational research with potential applications spanning critical mineral extraction, biotechnologies, microelectronics and advanced manufacturing.

The six centers are housed at U.S. institutions of higher education in five states, including one in the NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR) program. The NSF EPSCoR program builds research capacity in states that have traditionally received lower levels of federal funding. The centers' partners include more than twenty research institutions, technology companies and educational organizations, as well as multiple Department of Energy national laboratories and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

NSF's investment in the centers will also help grow the scientific workforce throughout the country. Collectively, the six centers will provide education, mentorship and specialized training for more than 60 early career researchers, more than 150 graduate students and more than 250 undergraduate students.