UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Materials Research Institute (MRI) has announced new seed grant opportunities for Penn State faculty in a variety of research themes, with a goal of sparking new collaborations that will develop high-risk, high-impact transformative proposals via materials research.
Those eligible to apply for the grants include all tenured/tenure track and nontenured research faculty from any Penn State location. Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) researchers with a record of accomplishment in external funding and publishing are also encouraged to apply.
Grant categories include:
Quantum Device Chip Packaging and Quantum Systems: Developing quantum technologies for revolutionary communication and sensor platforms is a major challenge that requires innovative material and device design. This grant would develop packaging concepts for Rydberg gases that can provide room temperature functions such as electrometry and also enable vector magnetometry and enable highly accurate and high-frequency timing devices.
Sustainable Materials: Proposals are sought for collaborations that would address processing, characterization and circular techno-economic analysis of sustainable materials. Broad topics would include carbon dioxide material footprint, bioprocesses for sustainable materials, circular economy, disruptive concepts in materials recycling, and detailed analyses and case studies.
Convergence at the Intersection of Materials – Life – Health Sciences: This topic area is focused on seeding collaborations between researchers affiliated with MRI, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the College of Medicine. Priority areas for this topic include regenerative medicine, materials characterization applied to biological samples of interest, and artificial organs and limbs including advanced prosthetics.
Integrated Projects in Data Science, Advanced Characterization, and Materials Processing: For this grant, MRI seeks to seed teams that are pushing the boundaries of data science tools to advance materials characterization and processing. This includes new experimental and data science methods to complement materials genome and large-scale computational projects, diagnostic tools to aid in data collection surrounding rare earth and other crucial elements, and the use of cutting-edge research methodologies and characterization tools to support energy-efficient extraction of critical metals from coal sources.
MRI-ARL Partnership: Exploration of new collaborations between ARL and MRI will drive this grant topic, including but not limited to work in manufacturing processes, materials characterization and simulation. Potential topics of interest include advanced ceramics processing, scalable high-temperature composite processing, coatings and their degradation, high-temperature materials for extreme environments, simulation of materials processing, and sensors.
All pre-proposals must be submitted electronically to InfoReady no later than 5 p.m. EST (Eastern Standard Time) on Nov. 30. For more information including full submission instructions, visit https://www.mri.psu.edu/mri-seed-grant.