NSF Will Provide $81 Million to Support New NNCI

The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) announced on September 17, 2015, that the National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide a total of $81 million over five years to support 16 sites and a coordinating office as part of a new National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI).  The awards are for up to five years and range from $500,000 to $1.6 million each per year.  Nine of the sites have at least one regional partner institution.  The 16 sites are located in 15 states and involve 27 universities.  The NNCI sites are intended to provide researchers from academia, government, and companies with access to university user facilities with leading-edge fabrication and characterization tools, instrumentation, and expertise within all disciplines of nanoscale science, engineering and technology.  One of the newly awarded sites will be chosen to coordinate the facilities, including establishing a web portal to link the individual facilities’ websites to provide a unified entry point to the user community of overall capabilities, tools, and instrumentation.  The new NNCI awards include:

• Mid-Atlantic Nanotechnology Hub for Research, Education and Innovation, University of Pennsylvania with partner Community College of Philadelphia, principal investigator (PI): Mark Allen;
• Texas Nanofabrication Facility, University of Texas at Austin, PI: Sanjay Banerjee;
• Northwest Nanotechnology Infrastructure, University of Washington with partner Oregon State University, PI: Karl Bohringer;
• Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor, Georgia Institute of Technology with partners North Carolina A&T State University and University of North Carolina-Greensboro, PI: Oliver Brand;
• Midwest Nano Infrastructure Corridor, University of Minnesota Twin Cities with partner North Dakota State University, PI: Stephen Campbell;
• Montana Nanotechnology Facility, Montana State University with partner Carlton College, PI: David Dickensheets;
• Soft and Hybrid Nanotechnology Experimental Resource, Northwestern University with partner University of Chicago, PI: Vinayak Dravid;
• The Virginia Tech National Center for Earth and Environmental Nanotechnology Infrastructure, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, PI: Michael Hochella;
• North Carolina Research Triangle Nanotechnology Network, North Carolina State University with partners Duke University and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, PI: Jacob Jones;
• San Diego Nanotechnology Infrastructure, University of California, San Diego, PI: Yu-Hwa Lo;
• Stanford Site, Stanford University, PI: Kathryn Moler;
• Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility, Cornell University, PI: Daniel Ralph;
• Nebraska Nanoscale Facility, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, PI: David Sellmyer;
• Nanotechnology Collaborative Infrastructure Southwest, Arizona State University with partners Maricopa County Community College District and Science Foundation Arizona, PI: Trevor Thornton;
• The Kentucky Multi-scale Manufacturing and Nano Integration Node, University of Louisville with partner University of Kentucky, PI: Kevin Walsh; and
• The Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard University, Harvard University, PI: Robert Westervelt.