US Department of Defense funds high-risk innovative materials research
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US Department of Defense funds high-risk innovative materials research www.grants.gov
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ext to celebrities and superstar athletes, a sure-fire way to draw a crowd on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, lately is to present some amazing science— including materials research. That was certainly the case on January 30 at a luncheon briefing for members of Congress and their staff, put on by the Coalition of National Security Research (CNSR), an advocacy group for sustained support for the US Department of Defense (DoD) science and technology (S&T) research programs administered by the Pentagon’s Basic Research Office (BRO). Along with a poster session—and a great boxed lunch—a panel of researchers talked about their work in new or emerging areas of science that has been funded by the Pentagon because of its potential applications and benefits for the military. The speakers and other presenters were representatives from CNSR’s broad alliance of research universities and institutes, scientific and professional organizations, and other nonprofits that advocate for a strong defense S&T enterprise.
The briefing’s wow factor began with Neil Gershenfeld, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms—a laboratory dedicated to breaking down the barriers between the digital and physical worlds. He spoke of the Pentagon’s quest to reduce its supply chain to just 20 parts and how his concept of “digitizing fabrication” might help. Gershenfeld said he began with the concept of amino acids being the basic 20 parts of human beings. “We are trying to do the same things with nonbiological materials,” Gershenfeld said. With a discreet set of parts that can be reversibly joined, “we could merge computation, communications, and fabrication.” And rather than three-dimensional printers, the system he envisions would utilize self-reproducing assemblers, which could ramp up production of desired objects exponentially. Gershenfeld has labeled his concept in situ resource utilization. The practicality of being able to build materials on the battlefield with a discreet set of building
blocks would have other beneficial applications, such as planned journeys to Mars—by both government and the private sector—in which reducing payloads will be critical to success. Both intramural and extramural research is funded by DoD to the tune of about $2 billion annually, all of it overseen by BRO. DoD is the third-largest funding source for S&T research at US universities, after the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Programs include single investigator awards, defense laboratory and university laboratory collaborations, and training for researchers to extend their work beyond the laboratory. All DoD funding opportunities, including those that BRO oversees, can be found at www.grants.gov. Each opportunity will have the name and contact information for a person associated with that program, says BRO Interim Director Bindu Nair—a materials scientist. “Awareness of the funding cycles is cri
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