NSF and partners invest $45 million in the future of semiconductors
New research and education awards will engage diverse talent in innovative semiconductor design and manufacturing.
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced 24 research and education projects with a total investment of $45.6 million — including funding from the "CHIPS and Science Act of 2022" — to enable rapid progress in new semiconductor technologies and manufacturing as well as workforce development. The projects are supported by the NSF Future of Semiconductors (FuSe) program through a public-private partnership spanning NSF and four companies: Ericsson, IBM, Intel and Samsung.
"Our investment will help train the next generation of talent necessary to fill key openings in the semiconductor industry and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "By supporting novel, transdisciplinary research, we will enable breakthroughs in semiconductors and microelectronics and address the national need for a reliable, secure supply of innovative semiconductor technologies, systems and professionals."
The FuSe investment for Fiscal Year 2023 supports 24 research and education projects through 61 awards to 47 institutions, including eight to minority-serving institutions and seven to NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdictions.
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More institutions to participate in quantum science and engineering with $38M from NSF
From advancing the ways in which we create sustainable energy to improving cyber security, NSF's Expanding Capacity in Quantum Information Science and Engineering (ExpandQISE) program is funding cutting-edge research across 22 grants. The program also broadens participation by building strong connections between new initiatives and existing high-impact QISE research, training, education and outreach efforts.
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Keep up with the latest from the U.S. National Science Foundation. This is a daily look at notable news, scientific findings and stories brought to you by NSF.
NSF News
NSF invests $72.5M to design revolutionary materialsSeptember 18, 2023
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09/19/2023
NSF invests $72.5 million to design revolutionary materials
NSF supports 37 teams to create novel materials to address grand societal challenges and develop the scientific and engineering workforce of tomorrow.
A $72.5 million investment from the U.S. National Science Foundation will drive the design, discovery and development of advanced materials needed to address major societal challenges. The Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program will fund 37 new four-year projects.
The DMREF program brings together a wide range of disciplines — including materials research, engineering, mathematics, computer science, chemistry and physics — to achieve outcomes not possible in isolation. DMREF projects also include industrial partnerships to facilitate technology translation and train the future U.S. workforce in materials development and deployment.
"By integrating numerous research disciplines across NSF as well as federal and industrial partnerships, this program truly revolutionizes the design, discovery and development of new materials for addressing urgent national needs," NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said. "Some of these have been used to formulate highly sensitive therapeutic proteins to mitigate the primary effects of spinal cord trauma, carbon dioxide capture to address climate change, and advanced quantum materials and semiconductors for powerful computation and communication needs, to name just a few."
The DMREF program is led by NSF's Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate in partnership with the Engineering Directorate, the Technology, Innovation and Partnerships Directorate, and the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.
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New $50 million institute aims to use the power of math to model, predict biological processes
Building a mathematics-based understanding of biology at all scales of life — from individual cells to interactions between species — is the goal of a new $50 million institute supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation in partnership with the Simons Foundation. The two organizations are each providing $25 million to launch the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB). The institute will bring together experts across the mathematical and biological sciences to explore research challenges related to a broad range of topics and industries, such as the environment, biomedicine and biotechnology.
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Alan T. Waterman Awardee Lecture: Natalie S. King, Ph.D.
09/19/2023
“Show them who you are – uninterrupted: Radical possibilities for fostering identity and community in STEM Education”
What if we bridged divides that exist among government, private, academic, community, and industry sectors – valuable parts of the STEM learning ecosystem – to foster a STEM identity and community for all?
In this lecture, Natalie S. King, Ph.D., shares her commitment to advancing Black girls in STEM education, explores the role of curricula and teacher diversity in promoting equity, and provides insights on how she establishes and maintains community-based programs through research-practice partnerships.
King’s research is grounded in storytelling to elevate the voices of those who have been silenced, misunderstood, or misrepresented. She argues that there is hope for a promising future to broaden perspectives of what it means to do STEM, who can participate in these disciplines, and who is acknowledged as contributors. On September 28, from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern, Dr. King will share concealed narratives that reflect the experiences, histories, and cultural wealth of Black and Brown teachers, children, parents, and community members as they reclaim authorship of their stories and ownership of their identities.
Register for Natalie King's Lecture
Real-time captions will be displayed in Zoom during the event. For questions or to request other reasonable accommodations, please contact ccurran@nsf.gov at least 10 days before the lecture.
Click here to learn more about the series and to find lecture recordings for Asegun Henry, Ph.D., and William Anderegg, Ph.D.
To learn more about the 2023 Alan T. Waterman award, please visit
the Alan T. Waterman award website.
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09/19/2023
Keep up with the latest from the U.S. National Science Foundation. This is a daily look at notable news, scientific findings and stories brought to you by NSF.
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NSF invests $26.7 million in building the first-ever prototype open knowledge network
18 multidisciplinary, cross-sector teams will create knowledge graphs, connections and educational materials for a trustworthy open knowledge network
In collaboration with five other U.S. government agencies, the U.S. National Science Foundation has invested $26.7 million in 18 projects through its Building the Prototype Open Knowledge Network (Proto-OKN) program. An open knowledge network is a publicly accessible, interconnected set of data repositories and associated knowledge graphs that will enable data-driven, artificial intelligence-based solutions for a broad set of societal and economic challenges.
"From secure supply chains to chemical and biomedical safety to soil health, these inaugural Proto-OKN projects will not only advance the state of the art in data and artificial intelligence, but they will also have tremendous positive impacts on the societal and economic opportunities that we see before us," said Erwin Gianchandani, assistant director for NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). “Proto-OKN projects are poised to work closely with nearly two dozen federal and state agencies to collaboratively build a trustworthy open knowledge network, enabling researchers across sectors and disciplines to come together to use and transform data into actionable insights that will drive U.S. competitiveness."
NSF-funded projects will pursue data validation procedures, processes and metrics that will in turn ensure that the underlying data are accurate, complete and meet specified criteria. They will also prototype scalable, cloud-based technical infrastructure to address challenges across health care, space, criminal justice, the environment and many other fields. NASA, NIH, the National Institute of Justice, NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey are partnering with NSF on this effort and will work closely with the awardees to ensure that Proto-OKN supports each agency's data strategy while addressing use cases associated with agency data. An additional 15 U.S. federal and state agencies have shown interest in collaborating with the 18 awardees.
The 18 Proto-OKN awardees will support translational research projects in the following three categories:Theme 1 — Proto-OKN Use Cases: The 15 projects in this category will develop a knowledge graph, or "node," to provide datacentric solutions to various societal challenges related to equitable water distribution, social care, justice, carbon capture, the environment, health communications, supply chains, wildlife management, agriculture and homelessness.Arizona State University: Supply and Demand Open Knowledge Network (SUDOKN)
Georgia State University: An Integrated Justice Platform to Connect Criminal Justice Data Across Data Silos.
Georgia Institute of Technology: CollabNext: A Person-Focused Metafabric for Open Knowledge Networks.
Insilica: BioBricks-OKG: An Open Knowledge Graph for Cheminformatics and Chemical Safety.
Purdue University: A Knowledge Graph Warehouse for Neighborhood Information.
Purdue University: Knowledge Graph Construction for Resilient, Trustworthy, and Secure Software Supply Chains.
Temple University: DREAM-KG: Develop Dynamic, REsponsive, Adaptive, and Multifaceted Knowledge Graphs to Address Homelessness With Explainable AI.
Temple University: Knowledge Graph to Support Evaluation and Development of Climate Models.
The University of Alabama: Creating a Cross-Domain Knowledge Graph to Integrate Health and Justice for Rural Resilience.
University of California, San Francisco: Connecting Biomedical Information on Earth and in Space via the SPOKE Knowledge Graph.
University of Cincinnati: The Water-Energy Nexus Open Knowledge Network (WEN-OKN)
University of Maine: Safe Agricultural Products and Water Graph. (SAWGraph)
University of Notre Dame: Exploiting Federal Data and Beyond: A Multi-modal Knowledge Network for Comprehensive Wildlife Management Under Climate Change.
The University of Texas at Arlington: Digging Into Soil Carbon With USDA: A Knowledge Graph Informing Soil Carbon Modeling.
University of Virginia: A Dynamically-Updated Open Knowledge Network for Health: Integrating Biomedical Insights With Social Determinants of Health.
Theme 2 — Proto-OKN Fabric: Two projects in this category will develop and deploy the necessary technologies to provide "interconnecting fabric" to link the knowledge graphs developed by the 15 Theme 1 teams.Onai: SPIDER: Scalable Public Infrastructure for Distributed Entity Relationships.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: FabRic Integrating Networked Knowledge (FRINK)
Theme 3 — Proto-OKN Education and Public Engagement: One awardee in this category will create educational materials and tools for people or organizations interested in engaging with the Proto-OKN.Wright State University: An Education Gateway for the Proto-OKN.
The resulting Proto-OKN will benefit a broad range of people and organizations — including government agencies, businesses, nonprofits, researchers and others — by providing access to integrated information for a variety of uses, such as pursuing societal and economic opportunities, driving evidence-based policies and developing novel AI capabilities. Proto-OKN will provide an essential public data infrastructure to power the next information revolution, transforming the nation's ability to unlock actionable insights from data by linking information about related entities.
The Proto-OKN initiative follows investments through the NSF Convergence Accelerator Track A: Open Knowledge Networks and a yearlong Open Knowledge Network Innovation Sprint, which was conducted by NSF and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2022. The Innovation Sprint engaged nearly 150 subject matter experts, end users and constituents from government, industry, academia, nonprofits and other communities and culminated in an Open Knowledge Network Roadmap that outlined a path to an open knowledge network and informed this funding opportunity.
The Proto-OKN initiative also constitutes an investment by the TIP Directorate to advance key technologies — data and AI, in this case — while addressing pressing national, societal and geostrategic challenges, as authorized by the "CHIPS and Science Act of 2022."
Learn more about Proto-OKN on the program webpage.
ABOUT THE TIP DIRECTORATE
The NSF's Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, TIP, harnesses the nation's vast and diverse talent pool to accelerate critical and emerging technologies and address pressing societal and economic challenges. TIP comprises three primary focus areas – fostering innovation and technology ecosystems, establishing translation pathways, and partnering across sectors to improve U.S. competitiveness, grow the U.S. economy and engage and train a diverse workforce for future, high-wage jobs.
For more information about TIP, visit new.nsf.gov/tip/lates
